


In Which The Akatsuki Become Cats

by Tozette



Category: Naruto
Genre: Silly, Timeline What Timeline, cat transformation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-05
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-07 20:20:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 30,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4276683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Also," added Sakura when she was done, "I found this." She pulled the cat out of her bag and plopped him on Tsunade's desk, ignoring the way his claws reflexively cut into her gloves before he was even properly awake.</p><p>He blinked sleepily at the office.</p><p>His eyes landed on Tsunade and he froze.</p><p>"That is the ugliest cat I have ever seen," said her mentor, eyeing it over a sake dish, which she promptly drained. "What the hell is this?" she asked, reaching out and running her fingertip over the cat's strange stitches.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Several tumblr users have encouraged me in this terrible endeavour. So I just wanna say: Yes, I've sinned, but you led me into temptation here, guys.

Sakura was travelling when she found the first one. It was a solo mission, C-rank, and not very challenging. All she had to do was travel to the capital and fix the daimyo's pneumonia. He was getting old, and the flu this year had been bad, so she understood the concern of his wife, but...

Clearing the fluid out of his lungs and keeping him safe and breathing while his immune system adapted to this new strain of flu virus wasn't necessarily the most appropriate use of her skills. Still, the daimyo and his wife had been grateful and they'd paid handsomely to get Tsunade-sama's apprentice to come out herself and take care of them. Konoha didn't have so much money they could afford to pass up an expensive mission like that, especially one with minimal likelihood of combat.

The capital was rather pretty, all things considered: affluent, with plenty of the daimyo's money dedicated to art and culture. Buildings were in excellent repair, freshly painted with neat vegetation; the people were friendly, and for the most part didn't seem plagued by problems outside the ordinary; and the stuff they sold at the markets came from all over the elemental nations - the whole city was a hub of trade and education, and information was dispensed much more liberally than in a ninja village. All this, even though it was the middle of winter. Sakura couldn't even imagine what it would be like at midsummer when travel was easier, food was more abundant and disease less common.

But the best thing about the capital was that it was home to one of the biggest libraries in the elemental nations. It was nothing like the library back home - which, while extensive, was more of a repository of practical knowledge than a _library_ , per se. It was where Sakura had spent almost all of her off-hours during her stay.

Now that she was leaving, she'd had to return all of her borrowed books. The pile was kind of huge, and the thin, anemic-looking man at the desk looked at her over the top of his glasses with a strangely indulgent expression on his severe face.

"It is nice to see young people interested in the improvement of their minds by extensive reading," he told her in a reedy whisper. "Ninja don't come here very often."

Sakura smiled. "How do you know?" she asked, signing her books back in.

He looked very disturbed at the possibility that ninja were sneaking into his library right under his nose, and Sakura left before he could question her further.

The sky was heavy and overcast and dark with the promise of more snow when Sakura made it back outside. She didn't much like her chances of making it home before it started snowing again, but it had been doing that intermittently for weeks. Waiting wouldn't help.

So she threw her cloak over her shoulders, strapped on her pack and set off, pleased with the neatly shovelled streets. In Konoha, streets only got shovelled if the merchants' district got together and pooled for a genin team to do the heavy lifting. Here, the government paid people to do it - as their actual job. Weird.

Sakura was very nearly out of the city when she heard a hideous feline yowl, followed by the scream of a child. She blinked, turned, and edged toward the noises. She doubted it was anything too serious, but if somebody was injured she could certainly help them out before she left.

What she came upon was a very strange tableau. Three kids, old enough to know better, had evidently been aggravating a stray cat with long, pointed sticks. When she arrived, the cat had clearly had enough - because it had launched itself at one of the kids' faces and gone straight for the eyes.

There was more yelling and swearing, and Sakura scowled when she heard somebody yell something about _drowning_ it. It was a stray cat, for goodness's sakes. Didn't they have better things to do?

She planted her hands on her hips and took one step forward, injecting just enough chakra into it to make the ground tremble ominously.

" _What_ is going on here?" she demanded in a pale but effective imitation of the voice Tsunade used on uncooperative first year medics.

The kids turned, looked at her scowling face, and then scattered. Sakura clicked her tongue.

There was blood on the snow, but she was pretty sure it didn't belong to the cat. It looked at her, wary and still, for a few long seconds.

Sakura frowned at it. There was something... "Did they _cut_ you?" she muttered, edging closer. It looked like there was something wrong with big patches of its long sable fur, like it was missing or matted or something - not mangy, and not dirty, not really, but -

Actually... She frowned. It was very clean for a stray. "Do you have an owner?" she murmured, trying to edge just a little bit closer to see if it was wearing a collar under all that fur.

The cat hissed a warning. Sakura stilled.

She was a grown ninja and she could definitely take on a house cat, but she'd also done her share of D-rank missions and she had a healthy respect for them. Not every cat was Tora, true, but... well, why chance it?

"Okay," she said, holding up her hands and backing away.

The cat spat at her, teeth bared, and then edged into the shadows nearest the wall.

Sakura frowned. It... wasn't walking right. It moved like it was drunk, or like it had a balance problem, or...

Maybe those stupid kids had seriously injured it - hit it in the head, or something. Sakura debated for a second, but it was winter - a concussed stray wasn't likely to last very long in the snow.

She dithered for a second, and then the cat lost its balance again and she sighed and darted forward to scoop it up.

The reaction was immediate and _crazy_. The cat exploded into action, yowling and growling like a demon, and buried a set of claws like knives into her arm. When that didn't make her drop it, the cat twisted acrobatically and, snarling, launched itself at her face.

Sakura ended up on her knees in the snow, with the hind half of the cat clamped between them and one hand holding its forepaws tightly. Its teeth were still a danger, but mostly they were chewing on her glove, so it wasn't quite as painful.

"You'd think I was trying to murder you," she said incredulously, dumping her pack off her shoulder one handed.

She cast a quick, fairly sloppy diagnostic jutsu, and found herself frowning. There was... definitely something not right about the cat, but she wasn't sure it was an injury.

Its chakra system was very, very developed, even though it was drained almost completely at that moment.

"Are you a summon?" she murmured, pressing the fingers of her free hand against its sides to feel its ribs. It wasn't malnourished, she decided, since it was big and seemed to have a good amount of muscle, firm and well-hydrated, but...

A summon that reacted that badly to being touched without any particular intent to harm, that wasn't a good thing. That said bad things about the ninja to whom the cat had been contracted. And... it did seem that way, since the matted edges of the cat's fur turned out to be strange, unfurred patches where somebody had sewn haphazardly through the poor animal's skin.

She realised with some surprise that as soon as the cat had felt her chakra was medical, it had stopped struggling. It didn't look _happy_ , but it also wasn't trying to rip her flesh off.

Sakura cautiously let its forepaws go. The cat didn't move. It seemed... tired. Tired and frightened, she thought, and felt strangely sympathetic. Its chakra system said it was a summon. Summoned creatures were usually intelligent, even if they didn't necessarily understand human languages.

Different places tended to treat summons differently, but in Fire country, at least, friendly summons were treated with respect - not quite like people, but definitely not like domestic animals.

The stitches embedded in the cat were _symmetrical_. Sakura had never seen a wound that needed stitching that was perfectly symmetrical on both sides of the body. The stitches didn't seem to be bothering it now, but there was scarring there that said those... modifications... hadn't necessarily healed cleanly.

Why would anybody do that? Even to somebody else's summon - it wasn't as though the cat had shown any capacity to talk. You couldn't _question_ it. It was just... cruelty for cruelty's sake.

"Whoever did that must have been a real piece of work," she muttered, settling back on her knees.

The cat flicked its ear in her general direction.

After a moment's pause, it got to its feet. It still wasn't moving like a cat, she decided, frowning. Maybe it was just chakra exhaustion, though.

After a long, thoughtful second, Sakura got to her feet. "There's proper animal doctors back home, kitty," she said, scooping it up with one hand under its belly.

The cat went completely tense under her hand, but it didn't try to maul her again - which meant it was clever enough to interpret her behaviour correctly.

"They'll fix up whatever's wrong with you - and if not them, Tsunade-shishou's the best medic alive. She's worked on summons before." Well, she'd worked on Inuzuka dogs, which were almost the same as a summon, surely...

Well, maybe not.

The cat made a low, annoyed noise in its throat.

"Look," said Sakura, opening the flap of her bag and revealing the winter clothing inside. There were other things, too - a medical kit, weaponry, wires, emergency supplies - but mostly, with a mission like hers, freezing her toes off was the most dangerous part. "It's warm, ne?"

The cat gave her a suspicious look, and seemed to be contemplating things for a second. Sakura decided to let it. If it was as clever as she thought, it could probably decide for itself.

After a second, the cat puffed out its furry sides in a sigh and wriggled from her hands into her pack. There it seemed to realise that everything was soft and dry, and it burrowed immediately below the top layer of the sweater on top.

"Right," said Sakura with a half smile. "That's you sorted, I guess."

And then she turned back toward the gates. Her strange little passenger aside, she could not _wait_ to get home.

It was a two-day trip at a solid pace, provided Sakura wasn't making a mad dash to return to Konoha. She stopped at an old safe house, de-classified after the second shinobi war, and quietly dispelled the genjutsu that was hiding it from cursory inspection.

It was warm and dry and, while nowhere near as well supplied as actual current safe-houses, did see a supply run once a quarter and thus had a store of sealed water, basic medical and navigation equipment, and dehydrated or canned food.

"We're going to sleep here for the night," Sakura said to the cat when he poked his head out of her bag. "It's not very exciting, but it's dry and it beats sleeping up a tree."

The cat looked around warily, and then began poking his paw or his nose into every suspect nook or cranny in the place. Sakura watched, bemused but also a little annoyed. What kind of situation produced an animal that was so wary of things that might be waiting in hiding?

She knew some ninja like that, but none of them were very well adjusted - Sasuke came to mind, and the way he tensed and his eyes flickered wildly from place to place every single time he approached his old family home.

"Hey," she said, when watching him became exhausting.

The cat turned his face toward her, and she was once again struck by how cruel those stitches looked. Her mouth twisted a little.

Instead of commenting, or trying to figure out if she could fix them, Sakura pulled out a ration bar and waved it at the cat. "You want some?"

She unwrapped it, broke off a quarter and held it out to the cat.

He stared t it, unblinking.

"Okay," she said slowly, and then left the piece on the floor.

It wasn't, Sakura thought as she scarfed her part down, very tasty. There were some things that never were, and dried compressed bars made largely of protein and fat with synthesised vitamins were high on that list.

Still, after the cat had seen her eat her portion, he edged closer to the bit she'd set aside for him. Because of course.

"You don't honestly think I'm going to all this trouble just to poison you, surely," Sakura mused, watching him nibble at the edge of the bar. "You know if I was going to poison you I'd have done it by now... so that leaves habit, I guess."

His ear flicked in her direction, but he didn't respond otherwise. She watched him eating for a few long seconds.

It didn't look like he knew quite how to do it, and he changed tactics every so often with a noise of frustration. His teeth were sharp, Sakura realised after a minute. They were sharp and he couldn't chew processed food the way she could. Eventually, he dug his claws into the bar and used them to steady it while he ripped little pieces off to swallow whole.

That was both weird and oddly adorable. She smiled.

The cat looked up at her and snarled at her expression.

So. A cat clever enough to figure she was making fun of him. Well, he definitely wasn't an average house cat, that was for sure.

She held up her hands for peace, but he wouldn't start eating again until she looked away.

The cat slept in her bag, and jerked awake every time she shifted or moved in the dark. When Sakura rose in the morning, he growled tiredly at her, glared fiercely, and buried himself in a sweater inside her pack.

Right.

The run back to Konoha was largely uneventful, and she wasn't surprised to find that the cat had finally drifted off into a deeper sleep when she checked on him at midday.

It was Tenten and Kiba on gate duty, looking thoroughly bored and more than a little cold. She was pacing to get her blood moving, but Kiba was perched on the roof of the little station they used, catching the wan winter sun on his face with Akamaru. He waved when he saw her, and Tenten looked up.

"You're back!"

Sakura doubted she'd find that so exciting if she hadn't been at the gates. "Long shift, huh?" she smiled.

"Well," Tenten hedged. "It has to be done."

"She means yes," Kiba called, dropping down from his perch. Akamaru followed.

Both sniffed. Kiba blinked.

Akamaru circled around to her pack and whined at it.

"Don't tell me you really are becoming a crazy old cat lady," Kiba said, flashing his sharp teeth when he smiled.

"I think it's a summon, actually. I need to sign it in. I might have to visit your sister at the clinic later," she added thoughtfully. Tenten had grabbed the clipboard with the sign-in information, and Sakura leaned over to write on it. Her ID was already there - Kiba or Tenten had scrawled it from memory when she'd approached, apparently.

 _Cat, domestic, large; possible summon_ \- _Haruno_.

"Cats," said Kiba, wrinkling his nose. "They make me sneeze."

She raised her eyebrows. "You're allergic to _cats_?"

He looked affronted. "I'm not _allergic_. They smell weird. _That_ one smells weirder than all of the others I've met combined," he added, "unless you're using some weird new shampoo or something."

She shook her head. It was protocol to at least show them the controlled substance - which was to say the kitty in her bag. She carefully peeled away the flap of her pack and let them peer in, hoping they wouldn't wake him.

"Aww," said Tenten softly, upon seeing the cat curled up, half-buried under one of Sakura's shirts.

"I knew it," hissed Kiba, elbowing her in the ribs, "you _are_ a girl! That was a girl noise."

Tenten glared at him, and looked a little embarrassed. "Of course I'm a _girl._ "

"A _girl_ -girl," he said, rolling his eyes as though this was meant to mean something.

One of the cat's ears twitched, but he didn't move. Sakura was entirely uncertain as to whether or not he was sleeping.

Hmm.

She left Tenten and Kiba to the bicker out the rest of their completely uneventful shift at the gates and headed in toward the tower, where Tsunade already knew she was on her way. There was very little that happened in the village that Tsunade didn't know about, and frankly Sakura liked it that way.

Sakura _didn't_ particularly enjoy the knowledge that Tsunade was half baked at four in the afternoon, but she could hardly prevent her from getting drunk. Tsunade was a champion at hiding her stash, and neither Shizune nor Sakura could beat her _all_ the time.

She rattled off her report as soon as she made it into her office, ignoring the half-empty bottle teetering precariously on Tsunade's paperwork. Usually this kind of report would be made to the mission desk, but the daimyo had a politically important position and Tsunade took a personal interest in his health - since it was important to economic and social stability.

"Also," added Sakura when she was done, "I found this." She pulled the cat out of her bag and plopped him on Tsunade's desk, ignoring the way his claws reflexively cut into her gloves before he was even properly awake.

He blinked sleepily at the office.

His eyes landed on Tsunade and he froze.

"That is the ugliest cat I have ever seen," said her mentor, eyeing it over a sake dish, which she promptly drained. "What the hell is this?" she asked, reaching out and running her fingertip over the cat's strange stitches.

There was a growl that caught in his throat, but he stopped and shuddered unhappily when Sakura scratched the back of his neck.

"I'm not sure. I think he's a summon. Can you check to see if he belongs to anybody?"

"You're thinking of keeping it?" Tsunade's eyebrows rose.

Sakura shrugged. "If it's not somebody's summon sent to infiltrate, what's the harm?"

Tsunade grunted. After a second, her hands flicked through six or seven rapid-fire seals. They both saw the cat tense dramatically when she reached for him, but he didn't move away.

There was a pause as Tsunade's chakra washed through him.

"He has no ties to anybody," she said finally. "Although his chakra system is..."

"Big?" suggested Sakura.

Tsunade squinted. "More than that. You might find he's somebody's escaped experiment or something." She fingered one of the stitches on the cat's face, one that stretched from mouth to ear, where he was missing a whisker. "Although they obviously didn't take very good care of him."

After an impatient second, the cat snapped a paw up to Tsunade's finger and patted it away from his face.

She raised her eyebrows. "Excuse _me_ ," she murmured, and pressed against his paw with her fingertip.

Slowly, the cat extended his claws. His lips pulled away from his teeth, which were quite sharp.

"Fierce little bastard, isn't he?" Tsunade mused, darting her finger around his raised paw to poke him between the ears.

The cat jerked away from her hand and hissed, baring all his sharp teeth. Sakura couldn't help a smile.

"Well, he's strange but for all intents and purposes he's a cat. You can keep him if you want," Tsunade shrugged. "If that's all?"

Sakura snapped off a cheery salute. "Yes, Tsunade-sama."

"Good. Now get that ugly thing out of my office."


	2. Chapter 2

The next thing was getting the cat a check up from somebody who actually knew about cats. It would be one thing if the poor summon could talk like some of them, but Sakura had no contextual knowledge of what a healthy cat was meant to be like - what were its proportions? What was a normal range of movement? Vision? She could find and heal actual injuries, but complications and more subtle problems were going to need an animal expert.

Inuzuka Hana was just such an expert, and she was a little bit bemused when Sakura brought her new companion directly to the clinic.

The clinic was worn but clean, with a cold metal table and banged up filing cabinets and bright halogen lights. When she arrived, Sakura was still dirty from the road and carrying her pack, but she knew that as soon as she stepped foot inside her own apartment it would take an act of god to get her back out that door.

"We don't get cats very often," she admitted, peering at the cat with great interest and a surprising softness in her fierce face. "The dogs usually frighten them."

Sakura hadn't even considered that possibility, but now that she thought about it, the sounds and smells of excited dogs pervaded the air, even though Hana's three were napping lazily in a corner. Whatever else may have been Hana's expectation, the cat was utterly unconcerned by the dogs and their noises and smells. In fact, he seemed much more intent upon Hana.

"Huh," she said thoughtfully.

The cat sat still on the long, clean metal bench, looking - not _frightened_ , anyway. His ears twitched at strange sounds and the tip of his tail ticked with tension. He looked at Hana as though she was something that had crawled out from under a rock.

"Name?"

"Doesn't have one, as far as I know. He certainly can't tell me," Sakura shrugged. "So I guess I'll have to pick one. I'm not sure what. Probably anything but-"

"Stitch," said Hana, grinning, poking at one of his ears. Her fingers were clawed.

The cat tucked his ears against his skull and hissed.

"Oho," said Hana, leaning down to eye level and smiling wider. "Maybe _Shishuu_?"

With a low growl, he took a swipe at Hana with sharp claws.

She yanked her hand out of the way and sniggered. "Sorry, kitty," she said, but she did not sound even a little bit sorry.

Sakura couldn't help her smile. "He has such a foul temper, but for some reason I find it adorable rather than annoying," she admitted, ignoring the way this made the cat look, if possible, even more disgruntled.

"I feel the same way about puppies," Hana admitted, doing a much more appropriate job of checking his range of movement, ears and teeth and paws. "You're probably a cat person."

Sakura wondered about that. "Maybe."

Hana pulled out a thermometer.

The cat made the single most threatening noise she'd ever heard from a domestic animal. His claws were digging into the metal of the table, leaving shallow little furrows.

Sakura cringed a little inside. "Ahh- maybe you should -"

"It goes in his _mouth_ ," Hana informed them both, looking much too amused. "We have the same issue with other summons. If they're smart enough to let us keep it in their mouth, we can take it orally."

The cat's angry, suspicious look was not going away, and his claws did not retract from where they were embedded in the table.

Sakura rubbed his spine gently, ignoring the way he tensed and shuddered and growled. "Poor frightened thing," she sighed. "I promise I won't let her shove anything up your butt. Come on."

She wrapped her arms around his middle and used her chakra enhanced strength to yank him from the table. His claws came free with a spark and a couple of tiny metal chips and he _yowled_.

Hana was beginning to look a little dubious. "He can't understand what we're saying?" She fingered the furrows in the table. "He's definitely a summon," she added, raising an eyebrow.

"I'm not actually sure," Sakura admitted. "He understands body language and gestures very well, but I don't think he knows words. Maybe he hasn't learned them?"

"Hmm," said Hana, but she didn't elaborate - instead she ripped off the plastic on her thermometer, smacked one of the cat's flailing paws out of the way and jammed the little stick between his teeth.

He made a strange little grunt and every muscle in his body turned steely and tense for a moment.

Sakura saw it when he blinked and relaxed a little. "Yeah, I don't think he can understand us," she decided.

"I don't speak any of the cat dialects," Hana said, "so you're out of luck on that one. Still," she added thoughtfully. "He seems pretty clever. You'll probably get along all right."

Sakura hoped that was indeed the case, but... "I think he's had a pretty rough time," she admitted after a second.

"I'd say so. There's evidence of broken bones, there's a lot of scarring, and some of the old injuries aren't made by other animals. Usually I'd say that was the life of a summon, but those stitches are weird."

"Yeah, that's what I was thinking." The idea that somebody had taken an intelligent, reasonably innocent, _fluffy_ animal and hurt it like that made her simultaneously angry and sad. Since she was holding onto him anyway, she squeezed gently and rubbed his soft fur.

"He's healthy, though," said Hana, pulling out the thermometer and checking it.

"What's his temperature meant to be?"

"Around thirty eight. If it hits forty, he's sick." Hana turned away to toss the thermometer in a bin labelled 'USED EQUIPMENT'. She spent the next few minutes explaining to Sakura a little bit about how cats behaved when they were sick, and what kinds of things her standard diagnostic jutsu should pick up when used on a healthy cat.

Sakura felt like she should be taking notes.

"Well, Mr Kitty," said Hana solemnly, when they were more or less done, "you've had a rough life, but you're pretty healthy, all up - for an old man like you, anyway."

"Really?" said Sakura. "He was sort of - staggering? - when I got him. There wasn't any bleeding in his head, but I couldn't tell much more."

"Hmm," said Hana thoughtfully. "There's a couple things that could cause that. Lets see him move freely again, then..."

Despite his enormous resigned sigh and his ears flattened to his skull, he was easily persuaded to jump from the table and walk from one side of the clinic to the other.

Two of Hana's dogs woke and watched on with a perhaps concerning degree of interest, but neither the cat nor the humans took much notice of them.

The cat was no longer walking like he was drunk but he was not coordinated like a cat really ought to be. There was an odd hesitation and jerkiness to his movements. It wasn't obvious, but...

Hana clicked her tongue. "On the balance of probabilities, it's likely to be a mild birth defect - it's pretty common in cats that the cerebellum isn't totally developed _in utero_ , so they get clumsy like that. He might have trouble jumping on or off things? But it looks like it's pretty mild anyway. Keep track of it, and if it gets worse in _any_ way, bring him back and we'll run more tests - but we'll need to borrow equipment from the hospital to do a brain scan, so they're going to cost you."

Sakura scrunched up her nose. She could probably get whatever they needed for free, but she'd definitely feel weird and unethical if she was depriving a human patient of necessary equipment. Probably better to go through official channels, which meant... yeah, paying a _lot_. Sakura didn't really have that kind of money - it was rare that she went on a very high paying mission, and even her recent one for the daimyo was going to have to buy her several things she needed - weaponry, new gloves, a hair cut...

"All right, I'll keep an eye on him," she said, and Hana's wry smile was understanding.

Sakura offered the cat space in her bag, but he sniffed and turned his face away, so in the end she shrugged and let him walk beside her as they moved through the village. He seemed very interested in the goings on around him, although a little put out by his low vantage point - which he fixed, after a few minutes, by scrambling up to a roof top and ambling along there instead.

Sakura kept an eye out - not least in case the cat fell, since his motor skills weren't perfect - but most of the ninja using the roofs as their personal highway seemed more bemused than annoyed by the presence of a large, ugly cat making his way along there.

She was, however, completely unsurprised to see a team of genin eyeball the cat like it was a potential source of huge trauma. Tora, it seemed, was still alive and kicking.

Their next stop was not home - not yet. It was the market. By some miracle, Sakura had remembered to clean out her fridge before leaving on a long mission. Because no good deed ever went unpunished, that meant she had to restock before heading home.

The marketplace was mostly the territory of Konoha's civilians. While one or two ninja clans did produce some interesting goods, food and basic necessities were very much areas of civilian expertise.

The open expanse of space that the market occupied meant that there were no roofs in easy access, and so the cat had to drop down to the ground. Sakura watched his descent carefully, but he seemed all right. He took one step back, gave the distance a calculating glance, made a tiny shuffle - and then leapt and landed, bending at the joints to absorb the impact.

"All right?" Sakura asked, peering down at him.

He turned his head away.

Right.

Despite his general recalcitrance, Sakura had never actually seen an animal so interested in what was going on in the market. Even the Inuzuka dogs were mostly fascinated by the butcher and pretty much nothing else.

The cat, she thought, was pretty much intent upon the human interactions - enough that he occasionally got too close, and then became aggressively offended when people didn't see him and tripped over him.

Even worse were the small children. It got so that Sakura flinched every time she heard a voice yell, "Kitty!"

She was sure most cats would have made themselves scarce by then, but not hers. Oh, no. He treated grasping hands and sticky fingers like they were some kind of horrible contagious disease.

One child, a young girl in pigtails, made a valiant effort to catch the cat and yank on his tail, and Sakura was completely, colossally unsurprised when he whirled on her in a flash of fur and wild eyes and sunk his teeth right into her hand.

There was a pause, and then what Sakura could only describe as a wail.

The cat pinned his ears to his skull and flinched from the sound, and Sakura wondered what on earth he'd expected. That noise did more to upset him than the grabby hands and the dogs at the clinic combined - he let go, hissed loudly, and slunk toward Sakura with his fur on end.

Of course, now everybody was looking at them.

Mostly at the screaming child.

There was a brief, loud commotion, and the child's parent - a man, tall and heavyset, probably a labourer, Sakura thought - appeared, and with that peculiar instinct shared by all parents he immediately zeroed in on the cat scowling up at them from around Sakura's ankle.

"Your _animal_ attack my little girl," he said, sounding terribly aggrieved.

"Aa," Sakura said, with a slightly fixed smile, "I'm sorry about that. I'm sure he didn't mean it."

She _was_ about to offer to heal the hand, but the girl, upon noticing her father's attention, renewed her wailing at a new, more horrifying pitch. Sakura recognised that behaviour - Ino, after all, had been a master at it almost before she could talk. The child clearly knew how to manipulate her parents' heartstrings with very minimal effort.

"Daddy!" The pain of a cat bite was probably way less than she deserved, Sakura thought sourly. Her own mother would never have put up with it. Mind you, her own mother was _crazy_ , so that probably didn't signify much.

The man puffed up, chest expanding, even as he waved his hands and fretted at the child. "You can't just let your pet run around attacking children! What the hell do you think- Can you even see how _deep_ that is? Look how it's bleeding!"

The cat made a disgusted noise, like he was deeply displeased by how _little_ it was bleeding. Sakura eyed him.

"Well, perhaps if your daughter didn't run up to strange animals and torment them," she suggested, even though she did actually agree that for a domestic cat he had managed quite a deep bite. Still, his teeth were nowhere near as powerful as his claws. She remembered the table at the clinic and she rather suspected he could have cut straight through to the bone if he wanted.

She she did scoop the cat up again, though. No need to invite more problems. He heaved an enormous sigh but he didn't struggle. Well. Not much, anyway.

"Well, perhaps if you kept your pet on a leash like a normal person!" he yelled back. His face was starting to flush. He took a step forward like he could intimidate her with his size.

A vein throbbed in Sakura's head.

"It's irresponsible, is what it is. I'm quite sure there are laws about allowing animals to run free and hurt people-"

Sakura clutched the cat more closely to her. She was still pretty ambivalent about his place in her life, but she'd brought him home and taken him to the vet so he was _hers_ now.

"Maybe," Sakura interrupted and pasted on a smile, letting her eyes crinkle up in a way she theorised was pleasant. It was not very sincere. "Maybe you should keep your _child_ on a leash. You're in a village full of ninja." She opened her eyes again, balling one hand into a fist. "And ninja have animals. You wouldn't want your daughter to _make any mistakes_. We're _short tempered_ when we get back from missions."

She smiled harder.

Clutched to her, the cat made a strained wheeze.

Sakura realised rather abruptly that his ribs were creaking, because she'd been clutching him. She'd become unfortunately used to channelling chakra when she was angry, and had very nearly hurt him with her enhanced strength.

He took a deep breath and looked at her with wide, surprised eyes.

"Sorry," she whispered. She felt a bit guilty, really.

His eyes narrowed.

She wasn't sure what that meant but she was pretty certain she didn't like it.

"Are you _threatening_ my five year old daughter?" bellowed the man.

Sakura opened her mouth - and one of the ANBU dropped down from absolutely nowhere, landing on the edge of the argument.

His mask was painted with a strange, sharp-looking beak and huge dark markings around the eyes. The effect was... strange.

Sakura didn't recognise the mask, but she knew the stiff body language and the long dark hair. There weren't that many jounin in Konoha with hair like that. Most of them were Hyuuga.

"Sakura," he said, deep voice somewhere between bored and condescending. "Surely you have better things to do than to pick fights with civilians."

"You'd think," she muttered.

The civilian man was cowed by the mask and the deep voice - and, probably, the sudden appearance - much more than he had been by anything Sakura might have done. Unfortunately, her most impressive skills involved healing stuff with a touch and breaking things irreparably.

Sakura had no skills that were both harmless to civilians and impressive the way Neji's bone white mask and textbook-perfect shunshin were.

"Go," said Neji, in that flat deep voice that said he was actively fighting not to roll his eyes.

Sakura pursed her lips.

Yeah, she could punch him for being a condescending prick later. Right now? Time for a tactical retreat.

She clutched the cat to her as she turned and strode into the crowd.

The people thinned out in only a few steps, and the market was just the market once more.

"Haruno-chan," sighed one of the stall keepers, shaking her head. Her hair was iron grey but her eyes were young and clear, and right then they were also glittering with a little bit of amusement. The woman was a half-remembered friend of Sakura's parents, and she sold honey and strawberries here on Sundays. "You can't let people get to you so easily. Touya-san's just angry because he'll have to explain how Etsuko hurt her hand to his wife."

She offered Sakura a tiny red strawberry.

"He shouldn't let her run around being a nuisance in public like that," Sakura sulked, but it didn't stop her from taking one of the fruits. The little ones always were the sweetest.

The old woman laughed. "If you try to tell people how to raise their children, you should probably prepare for more arguments."

True. Sakura sighed.

"You tell your mother hello for me when you see her, won't you?" she said then, pressing one hand to Sakura's arm.

"Yeah," said Sakura, who had absolutely no intention of visiting her mother any time soon, "Sure," and she beat a hasty retreat.

Having made the mistake of letting him roam freely once, Sakura decided she'd better keep the cat right with her. Instead of putting him down again, she hefted him up to her shoulder. She paused to see if he'd understood, but after grumbling little growl, so low she almost had to feel it rather than hear it, he dug his claws into the strap of her pack and shifted to balance his weight.

"Let's just... get groceries and go home without any more drama, okay?" she muttered to the cat. He flicked an ear but didn't indicate that he'd understood in the slightest.

Still, he took a genuine interest in her shopping, which she found surprising. Once or twice he even seemed _offended_ by her purchases, although Sakura couldn't really detect any reason for it.

They were almost done, finally - really, now she was just debating tomatoes for Sasuke, in case Naruto dragged him along to her house - when the cat on her shoulder let out a plaintive _mrow_.

"Eh?" She glanced at him, and then around at -

He batted her face with one paw to get her attention and then jerked his nose in the direction of a stall labelled "Exotics and Oddities." There were indeed any number of strange items - foreign books, a couple of carved wooden instruments that Sakura recognised as coming from the Land of Rice, a Stone Country magnet game for children... There were also cages or cases filled with lizards and non-venomous snakes and a few bored-looking birds. What the cat seemed most determined to draw her attention to, however, was sort of hard to miss.

It was so dreadfully noisy, after all.

There might have been a heavy dark cloth draped over the cage, but Sakura could hear a relentless yowling going on beneath it.

"Are you serious," Sakura muttered, edging closer.

"Aha," said the stall owner, grinning at her. His smile was a little... strained, Sakura thought. "A cat lover, I see!"

"Yes," she said slowly. "I don't suppose - is that a normal cat?" she asked, but she suspected the answer before he gave it.

"Not at all!" beamed the owner.

"Ah," said Sakura flatly, even as the cat on her shoulder swiped impatiently at her ear, "Great. All right, let's see it."

When the owner swept away the cloth and revealed the creature beneath, Sakura was still holding out hope for something comparatively normal, but...

The noises stopped at the sudden influx of light. The cage was almost not big enough to contain the cat inside it. His coat was long and absolutely white and it looked terribly luxurious.

He fixed a pair of absolutely bizarre purple eyes upon Sakura's and _yowled_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is completely ridiculous and you should comment on it to let me know what you liked best about this chapter.


	3. Chapter 3

Sakura ended up heading straight back to the Inuzuka clinic. The dogs gave her bemused looks as she strode right up to the door again.

"Hi. Sorry," she said perfunctorily, plonking her cage down on the bench. "I found another one in the market."

"In a birdcage," Hana said, frowning at the ornate arched cage. "You know you shouldn't keep him in there. It's way too small."

It was, too. There were parts of the cat's fur that stuck out, thick and fluffy, between the bars. He made a low, angry growl.

A pause. Then, "Is that blood on his paws?"

"Don't worry," said Sakura with a scowl, showing Hana her arm, which had indeed been sliced deep. She had had to use _healing chakra_ on a _cat scratch_. "It's not his. I figure I'll let him out when I get home, then he can rip up some furniture and get it out of his system. Hopefully his buddy'll calm him down," she added, gesturing to the huge ugly cat perched, oddly gracefully, upon the bulge of groceries in the top of her pack.

"They're savage little bastards, aren't they?" Hana gave her a long, serious look. "Are you going to become a weird cat lady?" she asked gravely.

Sakura sweatdropped. "I... hope not," she muttered, staring straight past Hana in uncertain horror.

"Sakura," said Hana, reaching over to touch her shoulder. "Plenty of people have summons without turning into crazy shut ins. You'll be fine."

"Yeah," said Sakura slowly, but she was glancing unhappily at Hana's sharp clawed fingers and long teeth. "Well. I think he hates me, anyway."

"If you found him in a bird cage in the market and he can't understand human languages, he probably hates everyone right now," Hana pointed out. She pulled on a pair of huge, thick gloves and reached for the cage.

The cat took the gloves as a challenge.

The cat _won_.

"Shit!" Hana yelped, and then the cat was _flying_ through the air, spitting and yowling. His bloodied paws hit the filing cabinet, sending it flying and clattering to the ground, and he leapt clear, twisting away from Hana's one-handed swipe through the air.

He hit the ground running, claws leaving ugly scrapes on the floor, and -

One of the Haimaru brothers body-slammed him.

The cat made an awkward wheezing sound, flattened beneath sixty kilograms of fur and muscle.

The ugly cat jumped off Sakura's pack while she watched, bemused, and he sauntered casually toward the struggling cat. Then he stopped, sat in full view, and began cleaning his stitched paws.

Sakura was surprised to find that the pale cat still had the breath to make a low growling noise in the back of his throat.

"Okay," she sighed, picking her way between the scattered files to get to them, "I guess we'll do it this way instead." And she reached forward with one finger lit with pale medical chakra and pressed it to the cat's little white head.

He jerked and yowled, but it only took a few more seconds for him to blink sleepily. He shook his head. He blinked again.

He sneezed.

When Hana's dog got up, gingerly giving the cat his space, the white cat twitched, staggered to his paws, made a confused _mrow?_ and then slumped sideways, insensible.

The other cat seemed completely unconcerned, which definitely supported Sakura's theory that he could sense or somehow tell what kind of chakra she was using. It had been he who wanted her to get the second cat so badly, after all.

The white cat sprawled bonelessly on the bench with his pretty purple eyes all glassy and unfocused. His sides moved too quickly with his breath.

"All right," said Hana, looking a bit frazzled. Then: "Good news, his range of movement's fine."

That was something of a pity, Sakura thought sourly, since she'd much prefer the crazy cat had all the balance problems. It might make him easier to _catch_.

* * *

It was almost dark when Sakura got back to her apartment, and when she did there was a notice on the door that her apartment was being cleared out and put up for rent within the next week on account of her "death". It happened _every time_ one of Sakura's missions took even a day longer than expected, whether or not she had paid up for longer.

Her landlord was weird, and not terribly fond of active shinobi tenants - to be fair, they did tend to make poor rental prospects, and Sakura _had_ put "hospital medic" on her application.

She rolled her eyes at the passive-aggressive notice, then jiggled the key in the lock in the oddly specific way the old apartment door required. She slammed the stiff door with her hip, hands full of groceries, mission pack and sedated cat.

 _Home_ , she thought finally, relieved and a little tired.

She set down the cage with its semi-aware inhabitant, shrugged her pack (and her second cat) off her shoulder and ripped the paper from her door before kicking it closed.

The front door opened into a living area. To the left was a tiny tiled section separated from the rest of the room by a bench. It was the most miniscule kitchen ever, but it did have all of the necessities. The rest of the room was a second-hand couch shoved into one corner, a table overflowing with half-finished hospital paperwork and files, and a low table. On the far side was a door to the rest of the apartment: a short corridor, her bedroom room, an empty "guest room" (read as: giant mess of stuff Sakura had brought from her parents' place and never really sorted out) and the bathroom. Directly opposite the entry was a tiny glass door that led out onto a balcony, where Ino had managed to keep her single, hardy pot plant alive while she'd been away.

It wasn't huge, but it was home.

The ugly cat inspected the other one through the bars of its cage and, evidently satisfied, took off to examine the rest of the apartment. Sakura looked up from unpacking her groceries just in time to see him squint at the door into the corridor, shift on his haunches, and then leap up to snag the door handle with one paw.

It unlatched with a click and then he was gone, darting through to investigate.

"He's a lot cleverer than you are," she told the white cat. Since he was still in a stupor from her chakra, his only response was to twitch one pale ear.

Groceries away, she pulled out her soiled clothes (now covered in a fine layer of cat hair; delightful) and dumped them in her laundry basket - there was a laundromat a few doors down, which she'd have to visit tomorrow. For now, though, she made sure her weapons were in order, her first aid kit was relatively well stocked and she had a few ration bars, water, and some water purification tablets tucked away in there. Any ninja on active duty could be required to pack up and head out at a moment's notice in an emergency, and since Sakura's mission had seen no combat, that still included hers.

There were some things she could be without in the field. A change of clothes, for example. Water and medicine? Not so much.

"Okay," she muttered, peering down at the bird cage. "Out you come."

Gently and carefully, she opened the hatch and drew the huge white monster out. He blinked sleepily at her, and his tail twitched, but he didn't move.

Sakura's hands sunk straight into his soft fur, and she paused, considering. Might be the only opportunity she got, she figured, and she ran her fingers through it curiously.

"Ohh," she said quietly, blinking. He was _so soft_. At the clinic when he'd been struggling, he'd seemed like he was all pointy bits, but now that he was sedated and pliant, there was nothing between her and the softest, fluffiest fur in the world.

Sakura kind of wished her hair was half as silky as his.

He made a confused noise and blinked again, so Sakura sighed and picked him up. It seemed like a bad idea to leave him just sprawled on the floor where she might stomp on his tail, so she set him on the old couch in the corner to recover.

She couldn't _quite_ avoid rubbing his stupidly soft fluff one more time before she retreated.

And, er, maybe again.

 _So soft_.

 _So fluffy_.

When Sakura raised her head, the other cat was perched on her desk, staring at her with bright green eyes.

"What," she said, looking guiltily at the sedated cat.

He didn't blink.

" _What_."

His tail twitched.

 _Okay, Sakura,_ she thought to herself, _no matter how clever that cat is, he can't understand you. This is how people turn into crazy cat ladies_.

Right. Sakura shook herself, turned on her heel and dug out a shallow dish. She wasn't an expert animal carer or anything, but she at least knew enough to know they'd need access to water.

Then she threw open the door to the balcony to let some air in and headed for a shower.

Getting out of her travel clothing was good and the hot water was better. Muscles she hadn't realised were tense relaxed and Sakura tipped her head back and let the water spill over her face and through her hair, staining it a darker pink.

She was clean and mostly dry when she padded barefoot out into the main room again, which was where she found Yamanaka Ino reclined on her couch, flipping through a magazine and idly stroking a very stoned looking cat.

Her long legs were bare from the thigh, and her pale feet were propped on the arm of the couch, showing off the melon-pink nail polish on her toenails. "Yo," she said, turning her page.

"I _just_ got home," said Sakura, raising her eyebrows. "How did you even know I was back?"

Ino peered at her over the edge of the magazine. "Kiba. But, Sakura," her voice took on that teasing edge that had made Sakura want to punch her as a child. "He said you'd only brought home one cat."

She pointed at the furry rug sprawled on her belly, and then waved one hand in the direction of the balcony. Sakura followed her gesture - ah, that was where the ugly one was. Perched on the railing, staring out at the residential districts.

"I found another one at the market," Sakura shrugged.

"Cats," said Ino, picking up the white cat and inspecting him thoroughly. She didn't look all that impressed, although Sakura noticed she didn't stop stroking his fur. "You know, Forehead... when I said you needed company, I sort of meant, you know, human company. _Male_ company. If you become a mad cat-lady who never leaves her house - except to get all bitter about kids on your lawn - I'm going to have to rethink our whole friendship."

"Okay, well, one: I don't have a lawn because I have an apartment. And two, if I did have a lawn I probably wouldn't care because it would be _dead_ like every other hint of plant life anyone's ever given me - except that one," she grudgingly added, waving at the balcony. The ugly cat's ear twitched in her direction, but he didn't move.

"Sa-ku-ra," Ino said in what Sakura could only really describe as an aggrieved whine. "You _know_ that's not what I meant."

"I know," Sakura sighed. "I don't have time to date right now, okay? I just got back from a mission, I'm on call at the hospital all week, on the active duty roster as a field medic - and I'm doing the night shift at ANBU debrief starting tomorrow. I don't know where you think I'm meant to find time for a boyfriend, but a cat's about the level of commitment I can handle right now."

A cat... and maybe her bed. Sakura was very committed to her bed. She felt like it understood her on a, you know, a really spiritual level. She thought of it longingly, but it wasn't even dark yet and her sleep cycle would be tested thoroughly over the next few days.

Ino made a scoffing noise. She lifted her legs and pulled on Sakura's sleeve to get her to join her on the couch - and then promptly dropped her legs back on Sakura's lap. "If Tsunade-sama has time to date, so do you."

Sakura squinted, allowing herself to be prodded and manhandled into position. "... _Tsunade-sama?_ "

Tsunade was dating? Who? When? Sakura felt like, if this was going on, she should have known! Tsunade didn't always have time for her apprentices but she had time to mess around with some guy?

Sakura thought of her mentor's piles of unfinished paperwork and scowled viciously. Well, that was the last time she'd -

"With _Jiraiya_ , Sakura." Ino thumped her thigh with one ankle. Sakura blinked. "I'm not saying that's a good decision on her part but there's no accounting for taste."

There was a moment's silence.

"Look, I admit, he's a very handsome cat. But he's still a cat." Ino ran her fingers through the white cat's fur idly. One of his legs twitched. Sakura wondered if she should let Ino know that the cat was probably coming out of sedation and would turn into a violent monster shortly, no matter how fluffy...

"Wait, go back to the part where Tsunade's dating Jiraiya," Sakura said, rubbing her forehead. She was still waiting for _that_ to make sense.

Ino eyed her suspiciously. "He's here every other week - maybe a month if he has to travel by sea. He brings her sake. They go out drinking together. She-"

"Hits him in the face," Sakura interrupted, raising her eyebrows.

Ino shrugged. "So he's a masochist. Some people are like that, I guess. I see you've very cleverly deflected the question and redirected the conversation. How's that working for you?"

"Not as well as I'd hoped, apparently." Sakura sighed.

Ino might not have be a T&I specialist like most of her family, but there was no doubt that growing up under Inoichi's calculating eyes had made her fully aware of pretty much every trick.

"Can't we just drop it? It's good to see you, you know."

Ino's gaze softened. "It's good to see you, too. I miss you when you're away - there's no one else in Konoha who is determined to perv on Sasuke-kun and never, _ever_ date him." Her lips curved gently.

At least some things about boys, they definitely agreed on. Uchiha Sasuke was _always_ one of them. As kids, their rivalry was vicious; as adults... Well, they both knew a delicious train wreck when they saw one.

Ino tipped her head back, staring pensively at the ceiling.

"But, Sakura... Aren't you... worried? That you'll be alone while all your friends move on?" she asked finally.

There was a strange hesitation in her voice and Sakura frowned.

"Ino," she said, leaning over the poke her gently in the belly. "Are you planning on abandoning me when I become too uncool?"

Ino snorted without looking back at her. "When have you ever been cool, forehead?"

Sakura smacked her on the knee, but honestly that was true enough. Even when Sakura had become a professionally respected medic-nin, she'd never really been _cool_. Too uptight, too temperamental; she cared too much about things outside of her control and she concealed too little of it. Ino was cool. Sakura was...

Well, she was Sakura.

"What if I never get a boyfriend and I live out my days as a wrinkly hermit surrounded by millions of cats?" she pushed.

Ino wrinkled her nose. "I would drag you out by your hair, that's gross."

"Right. See? We're not going to abandon one another. And," she said, because they both knew where this was going, "I think you're giving our other friends too little credit, too."

Ino said nothing to that, which was just as good as saying... kind of a lot, really.

"There's a chance he _won't_ move to Sand, you know," Sakura sighed, patting Ino's leg. There was a scar under her hand, a fine senbon slice she could feel but could not see.

"What?"

"Shikamaru."

"What _about_ Shikamaru? You think I care what that lazy idiot does?" Ino dropped her head back down to scowl at Sakura down the length of the couch and over the fluffy cat on her belly.

Ino was such a tremendously good actor that Sakura almost believed her. She shook her head. "She could come here. She's the Kazekage's sister, it'd be a good diplomatic move."

"Great. Good on her. She's an absolute psychopath, but other than that I'm sure she's a lovely girl, and not at all a mean, pretentious, angry, friend-stealing little hussy," Ino muttered darkly.

Sakura sweatdropped. "...Ino?"

"You should hear him, Sakura," Ino growled, very nearly smacking Sakura in the face with her leg when she sat up abruptly.

Sakura lunged to rescue the cat from tumbling to the floor when Ino jerked to her feet. His head lolled, but his pretty purple eye was definitely looking more lucid. And murderous.

"He says the word 'Temari' almost as much as he says the word 'troublesome'!"

Sakura winced. That was... yeah. That was probably a lot. And Ino was, as always... well, she was magnanimous in sharing her things when she had complete control over them, but she could be very jealous about her precious people. Even if her relationship with Shikamaru had never been romantic, Sakura could see this going downhill fast.

She wondered if it might not be better if Temari _didn't_ move here. Ino was not a front-line combat type like Temari, but quiet information gathering and well-planned sabotage? That was Ino all over.

"Ugh," spat Ino. "I don't want to talk about this. I'm sick of _thinking_ about this."

Sakura considered pressing the issue, but she decided against it. After a few moments she shrugged. "Well... these guys don't have names yet," she suggested, pointing at the fluffy longhair slumped on the couch. "Or if they do, they can't tell me. What do you think?"

"This pretty baby? Call him _Fuwafuwa_ ," Ino cooed, reaching down to pet the white cat, and Sakura snorted.

The cat twitched violently but without much coordination.

Ino paused in her patting movements. "Is... he okay?"

"He's sedated. He nearly took Hana's arm off. I'm actually pretty sure he hates me and he's pure evil. But he's a summon, too, and I couldn't really leave him in the cage."

"Nooo," said Ino, scraping her nails over the white kitty's fur, even as he widened his wild eyes at her and made a very clumsy swipe for her hand. "He's so cute and soft and _fluffy_ , he can't possibly be evil. No you can't," she added happily to the cat. "Sora. Shiromaru. Haru. Yuki -"

"All very original," Sakura drawled.

"Thank you." She yanked her hand away from a slightly more coordinated flailing paw. "Ooh, I bet he's quick when he's awake. Hmm. Call him Nezumi," she added, waving one finger at him. His paw was not quite quick enough, but he was recovering fast.

" _Nezumi_ ," Sakura repeated, smiling despite herself. "Sure. That's great."

"...Really?" Ino said, eyeing her suspiciously.

"It's cute. And it's not like he can understand it, so why not?"

They both quickly turned their attention to the other cat, who seemed to sense the weight of their combined gaze and turned to glance at them.

"Ugh," said Ino, wrinkling her nose. "I'm not really a cat person, but even _you_ have to admit that thing's hideous."

"He is not!" Sakura protested.

"...Sakura, something's taken giant chunks of fur out of his face. He is ugly as sin. He's lucky it was you who found him - if I found a cat that ugly wandering around in the snow, I'd have left him there. Or put him out of his misery, actually."

"Well. That's because you're heartless," said Sakura loftily.

"Nooo," drawled Ino. "It's because I don't want to wake up one day to that face staring at me."

Sakura rubbed her forehead. "Fine. Nezumi and Fuku, and we're very original and clever."

"Yes," said Ino, "terribly so."

And that was when Nezumi finally managed to get out one of those throaty warning growls.

Ino drew back, frowning. "Summons, you said?" she suddenly seemed to remember, and her eyes narrowed.

"Yeah. At least I think so. They don't understand human language, but Tsunade-sama seemed to think it was most likely..." Sakura cracked an enormous yawn. "I have to feed them before bed, too."

"You think they just eat meat?" Ino wondered, peering down at Nezumi as he tried to get his feet under him, complaining loudly with unceasing _mrowws_ all the while.

"I think this one eats the souls of the innocent, actually," Sakura muttered. "But I'm hoping they'll both settle for meat."

Finally, Nezumi rolled clumsily to his paws. He took two careful steps on the couch's dilapidated cushions and then crouched, coiled and launched himself at Ino's - well, Sakura suspected he was going for the _face_ , actually, but his lack of coordination in the wake of being heavily sedated sent him careening somewhere into her ribs.

Ino yanked him away before he'd had time to make more than one bloody scratch. "What the hell," she growled.

Dangling from her grip on his ruff and flailing his paws wildly, Nezumi yowled. He twisted frantically and tried to get his back claws into her arm.

"Hang on a second." Sakura leaned over to administer one finger to Ino's cut, cleaning and healing it effortlessly. She couldn't do much about the tear in her shirt, though.

Ino dropped the cat back onto the couch cushion, where he immediately hurled himself at her again, teeth and claws flashing.

She side-stepped gracefully, but it didn't stop her shooting a bewildered look at Sakura. "This thing's _insane._ I am never, _ever_ cat-sitting for you. Why did you even bring them home?"

"I'd be a lot less sympathetic," Sakura admitted, watching Nezumi scramble toward the balcony door, "if I didn't think they already had, you know, kind of a lot of experience with people."

Nezumi leapt lightly onto the balcony and was promptly tackled by Fuku, who growled a deep terrible growl and sank his teeth into the other cat's soft, pointed ear. With his lips peeled back like that, Fuku looked particularly ghoulish.

Ino's eyes narrowed. "You mean those stitches..." she took a moment to look at them properly and then: " _Gross_. Still doesn't explain why _you_ have them, though."

Sakura was not entirely convinced anybody except her would _have_ them. Fuku, although clever, was very ugly and he had paranoid habits and a tremendously resentful temper. Also, he plainly had no concerns about attacking annoying children. Nezumi... Well, Ino wasn't wrong. There was something _messed up_ about that cat, with his loud voice and sharp claws and desperate, crazy violence.

Sakura wasn't sure if he was panicking or if he just wanted to see something bleed.

That wasn't necessarily a bad trait in a summon, though...

She sighed. "I'm going to throw together some food and go to bed," she admitted to Ino, without moving her eyes from where the cats appeared to be trying to murder one another on the balcony. She wasn't sure why they were arguing, but it seemed best to let them sort this one out on their own.

As she watched, Fuku ripped a chunk of fur from Nezumi's throat. There was a splash of blood, but it didn't seem to impact Nezumi in the slightest. He lunged forward and made a valiant effort to claw Fuku's eyes out.

They weren't quiet, either.

"Really?" said Ino. "You think you can sleep through that?"

"Right now? I could sleep through a cyclone," Sakura admitted. "Are you staying for dinner?"

"Not if _you're_ cooking, Forehead. I'll catch up with you later in the week though."

Sakura frowned. "I guess?" She couldn't think of when that might happen, considering the likely complications in her schedule and how very dead she would kill Ino if she interrupted Sakura's sleep schedule.

Finally Ino hooked one arm around Sakura's waist and leaned her head into her shoulder. "I'm glad you're back," she said.

"...Me too," Sakura admitted quietly.

"Okay!" Ino righted herself and fled toward the door. "Enjoy your demon cats. Later!"

The door banged closed after her. Out on the balcony, neither cat was the slightest bit deterred by the noise. There was a high, aggrieved yowl.

Sakura decided that if they were still fighting by the time she was done making an egg on rice, she'd break them up. She would.

They were.

In the end, she locked Nezumi in the bathroom with a bathtub full of water and a bowl of raw beef, and let Fuku roam, limping but victorious, through the dark house.

Nezumi's cries were piercing and relentless.

Sakura put on music, turned it right up, and crawled under the covers. The beat was a lot easier to sleep through than the cat's howling. She'd figure out a more permanent solution at some later point. Tonight he was vetted, fed and watered and safe, and most importantly: not likely to murder anybody from where he remained locked in her bathroom.

In the morning, she'd see about trying to make friends with the crazy cat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your comments. Bring them to me. _Bring them to me_. Next cat looks like it'll be Itachi, for what it's worth.


	4. Chapter 4

Sakura woke to yowling at five in the morning. When she staggered out of bed and released Nezumi the Crazy Cat from the bathroom he shot right past her with only the briefest swipe at her naked leg. A second later he'd hit the balcony, leapt onto the railing and flung himself into the air.

Sakura winced at the clatter of his landing, but when she hurried toward the balcony to see, he was a white streak leaping over the roof tops. As unpleasant as the landing must have been, the impact hadn't even slowed him.

"Well," she said, looking sleepily after him, "...that's him gone."

She wondered if he'd come back. He probably would, considering that she had free food and his friend - well, his littermate, maybe - seemed pretty content to stay.

Speaking of Fuku...

It took her a couple of moments to find him. He was curled into a kitty ball on the couch, half hidden beneath an under-stuffed cushion. One of his scarred ears flicked in the direction of Nezumi's chaotic exit, but all he did was sigh heavily.

On impulse, Sakura reached down and scratched between his ears. "Good morning," she said softly.

He froze, ears upright and quivering. He bore with it unhappily for a second, twitching quite as though he'd never been patted before, and then reached up and put a paw on her fingers with a warning _mrow_.

His claws flexed, as though he thought she might not have correctly interpreted his message.

"All right, all right," she said, removing her hand and heading toward her tiny corner kitchen. "Just saying hello."

Five am was early, but Sakura had plenty of post-mission chores to get through and she wasn't sleepy enough to return to bed.

Instead, she clicked on a lamp, set water to boiling for tea, and started outlining the main points of her mission for the report.

"You know," she said to Fuku conversationally, "if Naruto handed in a mission report that was completely unreadable, nobody would even notice - but if I forget the daimyo's daughter had a sniffle two weeks ago, there'll be hell to pay." She waved a pen at him, the cap caught between her teeth.

Fuku remained completely unconcerned. He turned his blank gaze upon her, twitched a listening ear, but otherwise - nothing.

The kettle whistled loudly so Sakura got up to remove it from the stove. Green tea, for a little boost in the morning - especially since her mission had been largely uneventful, gone mostly to plan, and the report would subsequently be very boring writing.

As soon as Sakura poured the hot water into her pot and the delicate scent of tea bloomed in the air, Fuku jerked upright.

Sakura blinked at him. Maybe he heard a mouse in the wall, or...? She hoped he didn't have some kind of bad association with the smell of green tea. She sure wasn't giving it up for his sake.

She eyed him. He looked back at her, eyes intent and tail twitching with agitation.

"What is it?" she asked - futile, of course, but she could hardly help herself - and Fuku tensed, took one huge stride, and leapt at her. He crashed into her ankle and nearly sent her and her tea pot flying. She was lucky she'd reinforced her grip on the floor with chakra, or she'd probably have been laying in a pool of broken crockery and burning tea.

"What the _hell_?" she demanded, taking the last step to her desk and smacking the pot down on its surface. She turned to glower at him.

The cat darted right past Sakura, jumped upon her desk chair and lunged for the pot.

Sakura caught him around the middle and held tight with chakra-enhanced strength, despite his wiggling and astonishingly strong kick in her gut. "NO," she said, loudly and clearly, turning him so she could stare into his eyes.

He was not only uncowed, he was absolutely unimpressed.

Sakura frowned severely at him. She had a sneaking suspicion that she couldn't just keep locking cats in her bathroom.

For one, she'd need to use it eventually.

"No," she said again, less loudly but just as firm.

She set Fuku carefully back down upon the floor. He glared at her, but his bright green eyes strayed quickly to the pot.

The next hour was a terrible exercise in trying to keep the little bastard away from her tea pot. He was sneaky, underhanded and cleverer than some people she knew. He quickly developed the knack of judging when she'd finally managed to settle her attention on her report once more, and using that distraction to strike.

Some of his ploys made her wonder again why on earth he couldn't speak a human language. Maybe Nezumi wasn't very clever, but Fuku was clearly smart enough to put a whole host of complicated shinobi tactics into play in his insane effort to murder her tea pot.

"Is this like some kind of bizarre nin-cat training?" she wondered, eyeing him like he might be able to open his tiny cat mouth and tell her.

He made a low, frustrated rumble.

At last, Sakura poured the rest of her tea into her cup and drained it, clutching the pot protectively to her chest the whole time. Then she rinsed it and put it away up in her top cabinet.

Fuku then seemed to lose interest entirely, although he certainly acted cranky.

"I have no idea why my pot offends you," Sakura announced, but she decided she may as well feed him - at least that should put him in a better mood, surely?

She cooked her own breakfast first - rice on egg, spring onions, salted salmon. She was an indifferent cook and there was rarely a reason to stretch her culinary talents.

When she set out the raw meat she'd gotten for the cats, Fuku looked at it, sniffed, and heaved the biggest sigh she'd heard from him yet.

Sakura sniffed the meat to make sure it didn't smell bad - but all she could smell was raw meat. Maybe a couple of lingering smells from the fridge, but nothing bad.

She put it back down.

He looked at it reproachfully. Then he looked at _her_ reproachfully. Sakura had the sudden and abrupt feeling that she was being scolded by her grandmother.

"What?" she asked, planting her hands on her hips.

He turned his tail toward her with an offended huff.

" _What_?" she repeated, voice rising.

"What?" said another voice.

Sakura jumped and spun.

Sasuke was perched on the railing of her balcony, feet braced there with a thin edge of chakra, and he was looking at her oddly. He was a little pale, worn around the edges, with uncombed hair and tired eyes, still wearing his mission gear.

He looked _good,_ dammit.

"Sakura-chan... are you talking to that cat?"

Naruto peered in through her door, similarly dishevelled, although he looked less like a centrefold and more like a bedraggled puppy.

Sakura chose not to contemplate what she must look like this early in the morning, with her bed hair and her mismatched pyjamas, scowling at her cat.

"Yes," she said defensively. "He won't eat meat," she added, scratching the back of her neck.

"...huh," said Naruto, squinting. "So, are they - you know, hard to take care of, or -?"

"Who cares?" Sasuke scowled. Then, straight to the point as ever: "This one's for you, too."

He held out his hands, and there was indeed a black tom dangling from them, caught beneath the forelegs. There was a sloppy bandage around his hind leg.

He put up with being handled like a ragdoll like a champ, but his tail ticked with agitated tension.

"You brought me a cat," said Sakura flatly, but she reached out for it anyway. Sasuke was not the right person to be looking after small animals. Neither, she reflected, was Naruto. Not really. He had enough trouble with pot plants.

"Uh," said Naruto, scratching the back of his neck. "Well, baa-san said-"

"Tsunade-sama?" Sakura interjected very sharply, even as she pulled the cat from Sasuke and gently rearranged him so he wasn't quite so... dangling. He wasn't soft and fluffy like Nezumi the Crazy Cat, but he was warm and terribly placid.

"Right," Naruto agreed blithely, although Sasuke seemed to catch on to the hostility in Sakura's voice a lot faster. He looked like he was ready to get up and leave any second now.

Sakura sighed. "Come in, I'll - well, _no_ , I won't make tea," she interrupted herself, glowering down at Fuku, who looked up at her without shame. She turned back toward the kitchen, cradling the cat to her even as he shifted uncomfortably away from her chest. "But there's some leftover breakfast. It's just fish and -"

"If it's not ration bars, I'll eat it," Sasuke said from right behind her.

Sakura knew the feeling. "There's tomatoes," she informed him, waving vaguely toward the pantry.

Naruto kicked his shoes off and stepped in as well. "Tsunade-baa-chan said you'd taken in a nin-cat and were going to contract with them, and -"

"He's definitely a nin-cat," said Sasuke in a flat, sour voice, from where he was busily inspecting her pantry. He pulled out a cup of instant ramen and threw without looking at Naruto's skull.

It smacked into his head with a _whap_.

"Hey!" Naruto snapped. Then: "Ooh," he added, upon recognising the projectile.

"Kettle's hot," said Sakura, only half paying attention to the pair of them. There was an easy familiarity with Sasuke and Naruto, and she'd raided their homes or packs for food, hot showers, spare clothes, medical equipment... a lot of things, really. They didn't really keep a tally of these things anymore, and she didn't much care if they made a mess. If they didn't clean up after themselves, she'd return the favour in _their_ kitchens.

Instead, Sakura frowned at the cat in her arms. He had wriggled away from her chest and climbed to put his front paws on her shoulder, head peering around the room cautiously. He seemed alert, but he was badly favouring his bandaged leg.

With a quick diagnostic jutsu, she did conclude that he was yet another monster cat - his bones and muscle were way denser than a domestic cat's should have been, and the chakra system supporting them was huge, with a strange irregularity around the eyes.

So, yes, he was a nin-cat just like Fuku, but something more important had caught her attention. "What on earth happened to his leg?"

There was a grunting noise from the kitchen.

"...Sasuke?" Sakura said suspiciously.

"He set him on _fire,_ " said Naruto, with gleeful relish - less, Sakura thought, at the idea of Sasuke _murdering a kitty with fire_ and more at the prospect that Sakura might punch him through a wall. Perversely, this made her determined not to do that.

Hey. She was contrary by nature.

"He wouldn't stop following me," muttered Sasuke, so quietly she almost didn't hear it.

Sakura opened her mouth.

Then she closed it again.

"He... Sasuke," she said slowly, "did you attack the cat because _it liked you_?"

He grunted again and shut his mouth with a click, jaw clenched.

"I told you," hissed Naruto.

Sasuke said something in a low voice, but it mostly sounded like insults and swearing. Then, "He wouldn't go away! We were tracking a deserter through sixteen miles of enemy territory. All he had to do was step on a twig or -"

"And Isshin would have thought _there was a small animal nearby_ ," Naruto interjected, rolling his eyes. "In the forest. Where small animals _live_."

"It was risky." Sasuke turned his glower on both of them and resentfully bit into a tomato - just like it was an apple, because Sasuke was weird like that. A trail of juice trailed over his bottom lip, and he swiped at it with one thumb and licked it off.

Sakura probably could have watched Sasuke licking his hands all day, honestly, but she withdrew her gaze.

Her eyes landed on the table and her unattended breakfast, which was being thoroughly inspected by Fuku. She hadn't even noticed him jump up there. He froze when he noticed her gaze, but after a second he raised his head, met her eyes and hooked a clawed paw into the white of a fried egg.

"Rrrow," he said, pulling it onto the table in front of him.

He was still staring at her when he planted his other paw on it and ripped a chunk off with his sharp little teeth.

"That's so weird," said Naruto. "Hey, hey," he poked Sakura in the shoulder. "Do cats usually do that?"

"How should I know?" Sakura wondered, but she joined Sasuke in eyeing the scarred cat uncertainly while he neatly tore the white off the fried egg.

Even the black cat shifted around until it was peering over her arm at Fuku.

He prodded the yolk uncertainly, and then after a second tried to take a bite. The outer skin broke and spread out on the table top - and Fuku got the sticky yellow of it stuck in his whiskers and on his paws. He danced awkwardly around the spreading puddle, wide-eyed and with his ears flattened to his skull.

Sakura swallowed a laugh. Naruto didn't bother.

Fuku looked up at them with wide, surprised eyes. He then seemed to realise they were laughing at _him_ , and he hissed, baring his teeth.

"If he's a nin-cat," said Sasuke thoughtfully, "maybe he's used to sharing food."

Sakura hadn't thought of that, although it did make sense. She'd definitely seen Inuzuka ninja share ration bars and barbequeue with their dogs.

She glanced down at the chopped meat in the bowl she'd put out for the cat. "Are you saying I have to _cook_ for the _cat_?" she demanded.

Sasuke shrugged.

"Poor cat," said Naruto, giving the black cat a very sympathetic look.

"Better my cooking than yours," Sakura said darkly.

Sasuke, who was by far the best cook of all of them, ignored the bickering in favour of snapping up the leftovers in Sakura's frying pan.

While Naruto finally pulled the lid all the way from his steaming ramen and began slurping it down like a maniac, Fuku began awkwardly to try to lick the egg from his paws. He didn't look quite like he knew how to do it.

There was a sudden, abrupt screech.

They all glanced toward the balcony.

Nezumi was pawing angrily at the balcony door, looking tremendously affronted at finding it closed. As Sakura watched, he took a deep breath and let out another huge bellowing yowl.

He was, for reasons that remained mysterious, absolutely soaked. His wet fur stuck up in strange directions, and only highlighted the strange violet of his yes.

Next to her shoulder, the black cat gave a soft, plaintive meow. He sounded like Sakura felt. His ears twitched.

"Wow," said Naruto, like he wasn't sure if he should be awed or appalled. "Was I not meant to close that?" he wondered.

Sasuke took one look at the huge white cat scraping its claws on the glass, and hooked his fingers in Naruto's collar. "We're leaving," he said.

"Ahh- ahh, ramen!" Naruto made a desperate and rather acrobatic lunge for his instant noodles and recaptured the cup just as Sasuke shoved him out the front door. "Bye Sakura-cha-"

It slammed on his final syllable.

And so Sakura was left with egg yolk on her mission reports, a half-demolished breakfast she hadn't tasted, a new black cat and a hell beast screaming at the balcony door.

Fuku made a hugely frustrated noise, and she glanced back to see him very nearly yanking his whiskers out trying to get the yolk off them.

"Hey, hey, no -" she reached out to help and was interrupted by another ear-splitting howl from the balcony.

Fuku looked at her with unhappy eyes.

She took a deep breath. Right. "Stay there," she said, probably futilely, to the black cat as she set him down on her desk chair, careful of his wounded leg. She marched to the balcony door and flung it open.

Nezumi slammed into her shin. His fur was not only soaked but also _freezing_.

"What did you _do_?" she wondered.

He looked up at her and made that hellish noise again.

"SHUT THAT THING UP," bellowed somebody from the street down below, and Sakura flinched.

Nezumi, on the other hand, turned back to the doorway, bristling, and _screamed at the top of his fluffy little lungs._

" _I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL GUT THAT FUCKING THING_ ," came a much more familiar voice, and Sakura snatched Nezumi up and toed the door closed before Anko could actually make good on her threat.

"Shh," she said in a hiss, "Shh, come on, just be a _little_ quiet for -"

The next meow was comparatively quiet in that it didn't actually make Sakura want to shove a pen through her eardrums, but it wasn't exactly sedate.

Still, she'd take it.

"Okay," she said, heaving a deep breath. "Okay. We're going to," she paused, trying to collect her thoughts.

Fuku made another frustrated noise and seemed to be trying to _chew his yolky fur._

"Right. Bath time," she muttered, and scooped the black cat up one-handed - he heaved a huge, put-upon sigh but didn't actually protest. "Hey," she said loudly.

Fuku looked up.

"Yeah, you. Come on," she jerked her head.

He followed her, although he was excellent at that peculiarly feline attitude that implied it was all his decision to walk in this direction and her going that way was just a coincidence.

Contrary to all her expectations, Nezumi was more than content to leap into her cramped little bath tub as soon as it was half-full of hot water - and he swam like a pro.

"What kind of cats _are_ you?" she muttered, watching as Fuku approached the tub, sniffed the water and dipped one paw into it.

After a few seconds and a strange clumsy moment when he seemed unable to coordinate all his limbs, Fuku leapt up to the edge of the tub and - well, he looked like he was going to cautiously and sensibly lower himself in, but Nezumi swam closer and chomped on one of his forelegs.

There was a yelp and a splash, and then a pained yowl.

Sakura considered breaking that up, but honestly, Nezumi probably had it coming.

Besides, she wanted to see the black cat's leg.

She let him down on the bathroom bench.

The black cat turned his head and stared into the mirror for a long moment. Then he blinked once and turned back to her.

She pointed at his leg. Nezumi might have been dumb as a box of hair, but Fuku was clever as hell, so she was holding out some hope that this one might be too.

It seemed like Sakura was in luck, because he blinked his huge, melting dark eyes at her. One ear twitched. After a second's contemplation, his sides blew out in a short, silent sigh, and he shifted awkwardly and flopped on his uninjured side so she had access to his bandaged hind leg.

"You're officially my favourite," she told him, burning anything too unclean from her hands with a flare of medical chakra. She touched his flank gently to get him used to it. He didn't seem happy about having her hands on him, but he bore it without kicking, clawing, yowling, wriggling or complaining, so she carefully unwound the messy bandaging.

She winced when she saw the injury. There was a huge patch of fur missing, but that wasn't really the problem.

Sasuke had, very literally, _set the cat on fire_.

That would have been bad enough, but Sasuke's sloppy first aid was immediately apparent. Contrary to popular belief, Sasuke was only good at _most_ things he turned his hand to, and healing wasn't among them.

It was infected.

Not red-around-the-edges infected, but swollen-hot-pus-leaking infected, with a distinctly unpleasant smell about it.

Sakura swore.

"You are very lucky," she said to the cat grimly, "that I am an _excellent_ healer."

To her great surprise, the cat proved to be a better patient than the vast majority of ninja she'd treated. She knew it hurt when she drained the foul-smelling pus and she could see him flinch when she flushed the injury with bright green chakra to rid it of most of the pathogens.

To be absolutely honest, the cat was probably getting a more thorough treatment than many of the hospital patients Sakura saw. Much of the time she had to reserve her chakra for really serious injuries, and problems like this would be cleaned and treated without it. They did have a burns ward, after all - and, this being Fire country, and an enormous number of the ninja having fire affinities, well, the burns ward saw a lot of action.

But she was at home, and the cat was hers now, and she had chakra to burn and no real reason to conserve it.

"You're doing so well," she told him in what she hoped was a soothing voice. The cat was still and silent even when she used her chakra to close the most severely burned areas. He went tense under that prickly burning itch, but he didn't wriggle or kick or even make a sound other than a single surprised grunt with the first touch of her chakra.

"There," she said, a few long minutes later, and finally dropped her hands away. It might scar a little if she left it like that, but she supposed she could keep treating it if she decided she was very vain about her cat's appearance.

He was breathing heavier than she liked, but otherwise seemed to have borne the chakra strain of her healing well.

Gently, she dragged her fingers over his side. His visible eye rolled toward her. "Hey," she said quietly. "It's fine. We're done."

He made a very small noise, a kind of soft acknowledging _mrr_? and she was peculiarly reminded of the noises Sasuke made when he was trying desperately to avoid engaging in any kind of conversation.

There was a splash, and suddenly Nezumi was all paws on the bench. He leaned over the black cat, who bristled and scrambled to his feet.

Nezumi sniffed, then looked up at Sakura.

"Meow," he said, staring at her.

"I don't know what that means," she informed him.

"Me _ow_ ," he said again.

She stared back.

Since she couldn't understand whatever he was trying to communicate, she pulled her towel off its rack and threw it over him. There was a startled yelp, but she bundled him up and rubbed him down roughly.

When she released him, Nezumi looked at her with huge, wide eyes. His fluffy, luxurious fur was sticking up ridiculously. " _Meow_ ," he said.

Fuku, clean but bedraggled, had scrambled out of the tub and was once more perched on its edge, peering at the black cat with calculating eyes. He, too, looked at Sakura sideways and meowed.

She dangled the towel in front of him.

He hooked it with a clawed paw and tugged it so it fell to the floor, and then with a surprisingly graceful motion dropped soundlessly onto it.

Sakura watched him awkwardly try to dry his fur on the cloth for a second, and then shrugged. He'd dry eventually either way, and she didn't like her chances of taking him by surprise and drying him off herself.

At least he wasn't covered in egg anymore.

In the end, Sakura still needed to write her mission report and get her filthy mission gear to the laundromat at a minimum, so she pulled the plug of the bath and left the three cats to their own devices.

All she heard from them was an occasional frustrated yowl (definitely Nezumi) for the next hour and a half while she checked her notes and outlined the chronology of her long stay in the capital.

The daimyo's health wasn't the most riveting of topics, really.

Eventually, morning came and went, and the cats were mostly calm - Nezumi was asleep, having finally screamed himself hoarse at some point (she hoped). Fuku had disappeared somewhere. The black cat was settled on her desk, watching her work, and he was a startlingly polite companion: he sat on one corner of the desk, careful not to crumple her papers, and with his neat paws tucked close to his body.

Despite that, she had the distinct sense that he was judging her, although she wasn't sure if it was because she was still in her pyjamas (now slightly damp in front, thanks to Nezumi) or if it was because of her messy handwriting.

She wasn't really thinking about it when she made the second pot of tea, but Fuku didn't charge out of nowhere to violently attack the pot anyway.

She set it down on the desk, eyed the black cat in case he got any ideas, and poured herself a cup.

"Meow," said the black cat, minutes later.

Sakura looked up. "What?"

He blinked at her. Slowly, he took a step forward and sniffed her tea cup.

She frowned, looking at her cup as well. "It's bitter. You won't like it."

He meowed at her.

She shrugged. "Well, you'll only try it once," she said.

Cautiously, he dipped his face toward the steaming tea, whiskers twitching.

There was a crackle of ozone and a flash of scarlet light, and then-

Where the black cat had been was a man. Tall, with dark hair and tired eyes, broad-shouldered with a pretty face that reminded her _startlingly_ of Sasuke's. He was without a stitch of clothing and sitting on the edge of her writing desk.

Uchiha Itachi reached out, gracefully snagged a cushion from her couch and dropped it upon his - _naked!_ \- lap.

"Hello," he said in a deep voice, holding tightly to her tea cup.

Sakura did the only thing that made sense. She gathered chakra to her hand and punched him in the face.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story continues to make no sense, but at least now you have the mental image of Katkuzu with a face full of egg yolk. Leave me a comment to let me know what you liked best. :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I wrote most of this chapter on my phone.

Itachi had no time to dodge, so he blocked - which should have been the end of it, except Sakura hit very nearly as hard as Tsunade did.

Her punch hit Itachi's forearm and should have been knocked away from his face, simultaneously forcing Sakura to over-extend.

For the record, that _did_ happen.

Unfortunately, there was no way to muster the resistance to completely nullify the eruption of chakra in Sakura's fist. Even as she recovered, Sakura watched Itachi's eyes widen - just a little - at the sheer force of the blow.

Then he went flying, and she felt a moment's savage satisfaction somewhere in her chest.

Itachi performed an acrobatic mid-air twist and his bare feet hit her wall heels-first - and kept going. There was a muffled sound of shock when the wall cracked and was sundered.

Something gave with the shriek of tormented metal. A voice yelped.

"...shit," said Sakura, pausing to stare at her wall.

Plaster dust... trickled.

Her ears rang from the sound.

In the corridor outside, somebody began to scream.

Probably because she'd just _punched Uchiha freaking Itachi through a wall_ , and now there was a naked missing nin in the corridor of her apartment complex. Her _civilian_ apartment complex.

 _"Shit_!" Sakura propelled herself forward -

" _Haruno-san,_ " came an aggrieved and horrified voice. "That poor cat! What are you _doing_?"

She skidded to a stop at the ugly fissure in her wall because her neighbour was leaning down to collect a very ordinary black cat from amidst the rubble of a crater in the floor.

"Um," said Sakura. "What?"

The elderly Nishimura-san, who lived with his daughter two doors down, clutched the cat to his chest, awkwardly negotiating the balance between the furry monster and his walking stick.

"Haruno-san..." He looked at her, horrified. His eyes had the dull glaze of great age.

"Uh," said Sakura, shifting awkwardly.

The cat meowed, squirming in the man's grasp. He was covered in plaster dust and he didn't look very happy, but he seemed uninjured - or at least no more injured than he had been. The wound on his leg looked at least a week old.

"Training accident," she said blithely, reaching out for the cat. "Sorry. He jumped out right after I, er, accidentally hit the wall. I didn't expect quite that much... force," she hedged.

The old man examined the cat and seemed to come to the same conclusion she had - that it was largely all right, and that it would be injured much worse if she had, as it appeared, punched it through a wall.

She saw his glassy eyes blink toward the crumbling wall.

He relaxed. "Ah," he said, and allowed her to take the cat. "That's still not good, Haruno-san," he pointed out, but he seemed much more accepting of property damage than animal cruelty - side effect of living in a ninja village, perhaps.

Sakura accepted the cat with a mix of anxiety and relief. She didn't _want_ responsibility for a cat-shaped missing-nin, but she certainly didn't want him running free around the civilian population either.

"Uh, if you could just - er, not mention this to Yamada-san until I get it fixed..." she said, peering at her wall with a wince.

"Haruno-san... I think she's going to notice," Nishimura suggested gently.

Sakura cringed. "I... just -"

The old civilian gave her an uncertain pat on the shoulder. "Have a good day, Haruno-san," he said before he shuffled down the corridor muttering about 'ninja in his day' and 'respect for property'.

That left Sakura standing in the middle of a huge crack in her wall clinging to a cat that was, as far as she could tell, a missing-nin. Whether or not he was in disguise seemed to be up for debate, however - he wouldn't have gone out of his way to show himself to her (and certainly not quite so, er, comprehensively) had he been infiltrating.

She turned the cat around in her arms, looking at its face. She tried to see any trace of the young man in that feline face but she couldn't find it.

He tucked his ears back against his skull, watching her warily. Then he meowed once, soft and plaintive, and patted one fuzzy paw against her arm.

Sakura had no idea what to do with him.

Tsunade had clearly not detected anything about him when Sasuke and Naruto brought him through. The tea was-

A hand clapped down upon her shoulder, right near the juncture of her neck.

That was when Sakura felt the presence right behind her. She went wire tense.

She'd forgotten that her tea pot had been on her desk. She'd left it unattended in the confusion.

"Um," she said slowly.

"Inside." It wasn't really a suggestion.

Sakura considered for a second the value of replacing herself with something and getting some fighting distance, but - she was in a whole building of civilians. She wasn't prepared to sacrifice all of them.

The hand squeezed. Whoever he was, he had strong fingers, long and flexible. Probably a ninjutsu user.

"All right," said Sakura carefully, turning with the pressure on her shoulder. He moved with her. She could hear the shift of broken plaster under his feet. Heavier than her, she thought critically.

Once he was between her and her escape route, the stranger let go of her and pushed her away from his body.

Sakura backed away and turned so she got a chance to look at him.

She looked up.

The new ninja was huge, with dark skin and a hard face and bright green eyes. There were tattoos and stitches cutting ugly lines across huge swathes of his hide. It had to be Fuku, she decided, not least because he seemed too calm to be the other one.

Also, he was naked.

Sakura set her jaw and didn't let that get to her. She was a medic, and, really, a little awkward nudity was the least of her problems right then.

At some point, he'd poured himself a cup of tea and he was staring at her, looking deeply annoyed, while he sipped at it.

This explained why he'd been so hellbent on getting to her tea pot earlier, but -

"Are you _stuck_?" she asked, looking at the black cat - Itachi? God, _Itachi,_ okay, that was a thing that had happened _-_ in her hands.

"Yes," said the big man, taking another measured sip.

"Why are you here?" she asked then, blinking. "I mean... in Konoha? You could have stayed behind in the capital."

"You're a medic," he said flatly, as though it was obvious. Sakura listened to the tone of his voice and she developed the sneaking suspicion that he was not used to being told no about anything.

"I am." She blinked. "You're not injured," she pointed out. She could assess that from where she stood. The only one of them with any medical issues at all was the one in her hands, and he wasn't in terrible shape anyway. "You're a little low on chakra, but-"

"There's something wrong with us," he said, cutting her off. "And you're a medic. You need to fix us."

Sakura rubbed her forhead. "Fix you? There's nothing _wrong_ with you. You're perfectly normal, very clever, ninja... cats," she finished lamely. "Except that fluffy one. Where is he?"

"I locked him in the bathroom," he said shamelessly.

"You-"

As if the comment had triggered it, Sakura heard a hideous yowl. She cringed. Itachi's tail twitched.

The big ninja took another gulp of tea.

"I..." Sakura put the cat down. Missing nin or not, it seemed obvious that none of them was going to hurt her just yet.

"He's a lot easier to deal with as a cat."

As were they _all_ , no doubt, Sakura thought internally - but she didn't say it. "I'm going to put on another pot of tea," she said finally. "Help yourself to..." she looked him up and down. "A sheet or something?"

There were men's pants in her bottom drawer, but Sakura doubted he'd fit into any of them. Her team mates were all lean muscle and skinny hips, not quite finished growing. Even Kakashi was made for speed over strength. This man was... _not._

She came back with a fresh, much bigger pot of tea and found not one but two ninja in her house.

Itachi was back, wearing Sasuke's spare pants. He was perched on the arm of her couch, looking impassively down at the blooming bruise on his forearm.

"Thank you," he said, when she very awkwardly handed him a cup.

"I know who you are," she said to Itachi, "but I don't know you." Her eyes drifted to the other ninja, who had tied a towel around his waist like he was fresh from a shower. He'd thrown his tangled, dark hair over his shoulders so she could more clearly see his face.

"Kakuzu," he said. "You're the Godaime Hokage's apprentice," he added in a voice that was a little too speculative for her liking. "I wasn't sure until I saw you hit him," he added, jerking his head toward the crack in the wall. While they'd been finding clothing, Sakura had tacked up a bedsheet in front of it. At least that way nobody would be able to just look in and notice the strange men in her apartment.

"Sakura," she said, rubbing the back of her neck.

There was an awkward pause.

Itachi took a sip of tea.

"Um," said Sakura, at the same time as Kakuzu said, "You have a B-rank bounty on your head."

The new silence was even more awkward.

"I... do?"

He grunted. His eyes narrowed at Itachi, who had made no effort to cover up the damage she'd done to his arm when he blocked. It was a miracle she hadn't broken anything. "You do. It will get bigger over time."

"Oh."

The fluffy white cat gave a horrifying scream from somewhere deeper in her apartment.

"Should we get him?" she asked.

Kakuzu and Itachi shared a look. It wasn't a very pleased look. After a second, Itachi's eyes flicked from Kakuzu to his tea.

Kakuzu made an annoyed noise and got up, taking a cup full of tea with him.

"Er," said Sakura.

"Hidan is..." Itachi paused, obviously picking his words carefully, "aggressive."

Sakura raised her eyebrows.

The newcomer, when she saw him, was shorter than the others, although still a good few inches taller than Sakura. He looked like somebody had sucked all the colour out of him: white skin, white hair, purplish-pink eyes. He'd found a pair of somebody's pants, but the dark colours didn't do much to hide how incredibly pale he was.

"Stop staring," was the first thing he said, stalking forward. The next was: "Where's my fucking rosary?"

"Your what?" she blinked.

He lunged for her with a suffocating spike of killing intent, and Sakura replaced herself with a cushion, putting Itachi between her and the - Hidan, she thought he'd said.

Itachi didn't move.

Hidan spun on his heel.

There was something terribly potent about his killing intent. Sakura felt her hair stand on end in response. She couldn't seem to help tensing for a fight.

"Hidan," growled Kakuzu in a voice like rolling thunder. This did not seem to have much of an effect upon him. He didn't even look back at Kakuzu.

"My fucking _prayer beads_ , asshole!" he bellowed instead, taking two soundless steps toward her. He moved on the balls of his feet, quick and sure.

Sakura clenched one fist, gathering chakra. Itachi glanced at her, red eyes spinning lazily. He blinked once, slowly, then returned his attention to Hidan.

"She doesn't have your necklace," said Kakuzu, taking a heavy grip on Hidan's arm. "If you stopped to use your brain for a second, you'd know that."

"Fuck you, Kakuzu," Hidan growled right back, leaning into the hand on him without hesitation. Leaning in like that meant Kakuzu lost leverage, and Hidan twisted and smacked one foot into his ankle - or he would have, if Kakuzu hadn't moved smoothly out of range.

Kakuzu glowered. Hidan bared his teeth.

Sakura rubbed her forehead.

"The point is," said Itachi, cutting through the rising killing intent in his deep voice, "we seem to be stuck."

"Stuck," Sakura repeated dully.

Kakuzu turned to her with an expression she could only classify as 'annoyed as hell but resigned'. "We can't turn back for any length of time," he clarified. "I followed _you_ because of your chakra."

Sakura frowned. She _had_ used medical chakra upon Kakuzu when she'd first found him. She remembered now, the way his feline form had stilled beneath her hands.

And to think, all she'd wanted was to make sure a bunch of brats hadn't seriously injured a stray cat. That's what her good intentions got her, she supposed. Maybe not the path to hell, but- apparently the path to naked criminals in her living room.

"So you followed me home because I'm a medic. You," she scowled at Itachi, "were stalking Sasuke." He didn't seem at all put out by this description. "And you..." she frowned at Hidan.

He glowered at her.

"...I found you in a cage at the market," she said slowly. "How did _that_ happen?"

Hidan flushed red, crossed his arms and refused to answer. "I need my prayer beads," he said instead.

"Can't you count prayers without assistance?" drawled Kakuzu, and Hidan turned and took a swing at him.

The argument degenerated. Kakuzu repeatedly told Hidan he was being immature and stupid and annoying, but Sakura noticed that he seemed perfectly content to bait him.

Itachi was staring at nothing with an air like he was listening to wind chimes and water and softly chanting monks instead of standing three feet away from an escalating argument.

"They'll resolve it," he said when he noticed her watching him.

Itachi might have had the patience of a saint, but Sakura didn't.

" _Quiet_." She took one step forward and banged her fist on the table. It splintered and split down the middle, spilling paperwork everywhere.

They didn't even seem to notice, let alone stop.

Sakura hefted one side of the table and clobbered Hidan over the head with it. "What the fuck are-"

She reversed her grip and smacked him in the face for good measure, cutting off his burgeoning - and no doubt riveting - tirade.

"You," she added, lifting the other hand and pointing with the second side in Kakuzu's direction. "Don't pretend you aren't baiting him. Sit down."

"I don't -" Kakuzu began, glaring at her.

" _Sit. Down,_ "

"How the fuck do you think you're gonna make-"

"Sit down, all of you, _right the hell now_ , or I swear to god I will leave you chasing mice for the rest of your natural lives!" Her fist clenched, making the wood of the table splinter around her fingers.

Slowly, Kakuzu sat.

Itachi had never actually gotten up.

Hidan was underneath half a table and he shoved it off himself.

None of them looked happy.

Sakura took a deep breath in the silence. "Okay, we're -"

A knock on the door interrupted her. She closed her eyes. None of her close friends _knocked_. Ino, Sasuke and Naruto broke in. Hell, Ino had been known to break into her bathroom while Sakura was trying to shower if she felt like it. Even Kakashi just tapped awkwardly at her window before letting himself in.

"Haruno-san," came the voice she had been expecting - but _dreading_ \- from the door.

"That's my landlord," said Sakura in a quiet voice.

Hidan opened his mouth.

Kakuzu slapped a hand over it. "Shut up," he said repressively.

Sakura picked her way around them, through the wreckage of her table and her paperwork, and went to the door. Behind her, Hidan solved his problem by biting Kakuzu's hand. An intense, whispered war broke out.

Sakura pulled the door open and found herself face to face with her short, greying landlady. Yamada-san smiled at her, but it looked somewhere between pained and smug.

"Hello, Yamada-san," said Sakura, giving her the best smile she could muster. It was more like a grimace.

Yamada presented her with a piece of paper. "I've already filed your notice of eviction with the housing office," she informed her, still with that fixed smile. "It is expected that the damages to the building will be fixed within a fortnight."

"A...ah," said Sakura, accepting the paper.

She dearly wanted to argue, but punching through walls was definitely frowned upon by all the relevant authorities.

Punching her landlady through a wall might have been cathartic but would not ultimately help her with the situation.

"Right," she said slowly, flipping the paper open. Notice of eviction.

"You have two days, Haruno-san," said Yamada.

Sakura returned her fixed smile with an equally awkward one.

The door closed.

Sakura leaned her back against the door and closed her eyes. She exhaled a long, slow breath. "Okay," she muttered. Calm thoughts.

"Sakura-san," said Itachi from about a foot away. He was eyeing the paper in her hands.

She flinched. She took another deep breath. "Yes?"

"If it's a problem," he said slowly, "the landlord could be convinced you were somebody else she had rented the apartment to."

"Genjutsu?" Sakura opened her eyes and peered at him thoughtfully. It was unethical and probably illegal, but actually a neat solution - she could remain and her landlord would just assume she was the new tenant and Sakura was long gone. Elegant.

She sighed. "No, she's already filed it with the office."

"Ah," he said. His eyes drifted toward the hole in the wall. "That's difficult."

Two days to find a new place to live and three fluffy missing-nin in her wrecked living room. And the were almost certainly expecting her to solve their problem for them.

There was a _poof_ and a light, and Itachi was a black cat again, blinking up at her from a pile of dark fur on her floor. It occurred to her that the cats would need somewhere to live, too. Either that or she'd need to hand them in to Tsunade-sama.

A distinctly feline yowl came from the direction of the kitchen. Apparently they were out of tea.

Everything was going horribly wrong.

" _Shit_ ," said Sakura, running her hands through her hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some people asked about the timeline for this story. I think firstly, given that the most wanted criminals on the planet are fluffy cats, we should accept that it is AU. The timeline is obviously different - Sasuke either went to Orochimaru and returned, or didn't leave in the first place. Whichever it is I guess I'll decide when or if it becomes relevant. I'm not doing a lot of intense plotting for this story, as you may have figured. 
> 
> Otherwise, nothing to report! Please leave me a comment to let me know what you liked best about this chapter, if anything. :)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing really happens in this chapter, but I had to write _something_ so here we go. Kakashi's a troll, the cats are a collective menace and Sakura is spread a bit thin.

"Okay," muttered Sakura. She glanced at the cats in her living room and then turned to stare again at the hole in her wall. "Okay, I can deal with this."

She looked back at the cats. Kakuzu and Itachi were both  _clever_ , she'd decided unhappily, so she scooped up Hidan and shoved him back in his bird cage. Kakuzu seemed completely unconcerned about this, but Itachi was definitely watching. Neither, however, did anything to stop her.

"You're coming with me," she informed Hidan over his aggrieved wail, right before she stormed out of the apartment.

Sakura sped over the rooftops, more for speed than stealth. The noise made by the cat she was carrying was much too loud for stealth - even the civilians below glanced up when she came into earshot.

At the tower, the ninja on duty gave her a few odd looks, but between her purposeful stride and her increasingly peeved expression, Sakura was allowed through even though she was accompanied by a soundtrack of feline hysterics.

She bullied Tsunade's chuunin secretary - not one of the ninja with whom she was on a first name basis - into letting her through and found that Tsunade was busy with paperwork when she entered... a fact that meant she was pretty thrilled by the interruption.

The content of the interruption was... less exciting to the Hokage.

"This is the second time you've brought me a cat to perform diagnostics on," she pointed out. She wasn't annoyed exactly, Sakura thought, more - puzzled. Wary. Something. She bit her bottom lip. "I'd have thought Inuzuka Hana might be a better choice."

Sakura lifted the cage and plopped it in front of her mentor anyway. Hidan was noisy, but also trapped pretty effectively. She had no idea what that cage was made from, but she was pleased to see that his claws had minimal impact on it.

"I'm more hoping you'll be able to check again if there's anything... well," she shrugged uncertainly. Saying 'this cat is a missing-nin and I am absolutely certain,' was hardly going to be well-received: most ninja could dispel or see through any such illusion, and true shape changing techniques were as rare as hens' teeth and required a constant output of chakra. Tsunade would have noticed it with Kakuzu if that was the case, but...

Sakura skirted Tsunade's desk to make tea from the kettle in the corner. Telling her without proof was likely to result in a psych assessment.

Tsunade peered at the cat. "Sakura..."

"I know," Sakura said, sounding just as stressed as she felt. "But he's really-" she stopped herself because the risk of sounding as though she'd completely lost touch with reality was too high. "Can you just -?"

Tsunade sighed, and a soft green glow lit her hands. She pulled Hidan from his cage and completely disregarded his aggravated yowling. He tried to sink his claws into her hand and instead embedded them into her desk when she smacked his paw out of the way. They cut through the wood like it was  _cake_.

"I'll admit he has a very large chakra system, and a lot of bone density and muscle, but he's definitely a cat, Sakura," she sighed.

"There's - absolutely nothing?" Sakura plopped a tea cup in front of the cat.

"Nothing. Is that," Tsunade went on slowly, brows furrowing, watching him sniff the tea. "Tea? For the cat?"

Hidan lapped up the tea.

...and nothing happened.

Nothing at all.

"You're not serious," muttered Sakura. She leaned down to get the tea cup and - "Shit!" - Hidan sunk his claws straight through her forearm. The pain was sharp and immediate, stinging. Blood welled.

Hidan looked at her with his glowing pinkish eyes and made a low, threatening rumble in his throat. There was something triumphant and mean in that gaze.

"You little  _shit_ ," Sakura hissed, meeting his gaze straight on.

He peeled back his lips and hissed - and jerked out of the way, nimble on his paws, when she snapped her other arm forward to smack him.

Tsunade deftly picked him up by the scruff of his neck and shoved him, growling and spitting, back into his cage. She flicked the lock on it and ignored the way he showed her his teeth and yowled.

Sakura muttered some very rude comments and cleaned and healed her arm.

"I'll admit he's a little asshole," Tsunade said, regarding him darkly, "but I'm quite certain he's a cat. A nin-cat, obviously, which could prove useful to you if you can persuade them to contract with you," she added, tilting her head a little.

Sakura heaved a sigh. Apparently they could control the transformation - which was to say, the tea gave them the  _choice_  to become human, rather than providing an inescapable trigger. How did that even work?

"I understand that forming a bond with this sort of animal is stressful," Tsunade said slowly, cautiously, looking from the tea cup to the cat and back to Sakura. "I'm not giving you time off, we can't afford it, but we can cut your shifts at the hospital if you need it - drop one in four of them, maybe."

"I..." Sakura scowled.  _Stressful_. Tsunade-sama thought she was  _stressed_  and it was affecting her brain. "No," she said, eyeing Hidan unhappily, "I'm good."

"Then you can stop bringing me ugly damn cats," Tsunade suggested. (It wasn't really a suggestion.)

Sakura agreed. Her mood dimmed significantly, but there wasn't a lot she could do: she'd seem crazy if she tried to argue her point without proof, and she had no desire to have Tsunade insist that she was  _stressed_  and needed an evaluation, rather than just a drop in her shifts.

So instead of arguing, Sakura scooped up Hidan, and took off back to her apartment. When she was there she left him in the cage, collected her mission gear and took herself off to the coin laundry to get it washed.

Coin laundries were the kinds of businesses that attracted ninja like old meat attracted flies. They provided serious chemical intervention for the grossest stains, and since people had to loiter there and get their laundry once it was done anyway, plenty of gossip was exchanged. Several had public-use noticeboards and thumbtacks, and trade magazines advertising new gear were frequently left hanging about the place.

The laundry nearest Sakura was pretty much the same as most of the others in the village: big, with four long abused benches and numerous machines that reflected the bright overheads. The dryers were on the bottom, washers on top, and together they formed walls of battered metal. Everything smelled of laundry soap and warm fabric, and the sounds of the machines were quite loud - despite that they were necessary, Sakura found coin laundries to be pretty uncomfortable places to linger.

When Sakura arrived there was a knife game in progress between two chuunin at a bench. Several other ninja were looking on, although some looked more dubious than others. Sakura zeroed in on the younger of the chuunin out of familiarity - black spiky hair, bandage on his nose -Hagane, which she supposed shouldn't have surprised her.

"Yo, Sakura-sensei," he called, without looking up from where he was cheerfully stabbing between his friend's fingers. Five finger fillet was a popular game among shinobi - a thing with which Sakura was only familiar because she'd reattached more than one finger in her career.

Sakura made a noise that she'd probably learned from Sasuke: a grim, short sound that acknowledged the greeting and in no way invited any further conversation.

Her eyes lingered on the game, and she didn't even try to keep the disapproval from her expression. Heaven forbid that bored ninja take a nap or play cards or... basically undertake any activity that  _didn't_ make more work for a medic nin.

Still, following his greeting a couple of the other ninja in the laundry raised hands or mumbled greetings - a branch Hyuuga she knew vaguely who worked in pathology, a blue-eyed blond from Intel who she suspected was a Yamanaka she'd met once or twice before, and a passively unimpressed Kamizuki, who, leaning against one of the thumping machines, never took his eyes from the game.

"Third one's free," he said by way of greeting.

"Thanks." She took his word on it and busied herself with her clothing. She checked the tags on her bedroll and, after a second of squinting to determine that it was actually machine-washable, threw it in too. When she was done she slammed the washing machine's door shut, dumped in some change and set it to washing.

There was a soft, startling,  _mrow_? from above. Sakura tensed.

There was a black cat with dark eyes and an injured leg peering down at Sakura from on top of the washing machine.

"Did you  _follow_  me?" she wondered, scowling.

Which was a stupid question, really: of  _course_  he'd followed her. He didn't even understand what she was saying, either.

Sakura looked at him, eyes narrowed and face contorted in an expression of supreme irritation. She hadn't even figured out what she was going to do with the damned cats. She couldn't let them run madly around the village, but...

The black cat watched her right back, intent but remarkably calm.

Sakura clicked her tongue, annoyed with herself as much as the cats. Criminals. Cats. Whatever. In the end, she couldn't resolve anything here, so she sighed and held our her hands to him. After a moment's wary pause, Itachi stepped delicately down from the washing machine and into her grasp. Carefully supporting his injuries, she curled him up against her so he could put his paws on her shoulder and peer at the world behind her head.

Then she headed for the notice board.

Finding a new place to stay wasn't likely to be easy. The landlords who did take on shinobi tenants had very high bonds and many of those had a significantly higher monthly rent, due to the definite possibility that tenants could die or be declared MIA. Despite that, Sakura was pretty sure she wouldn't be successful in getting any kind of place to stay in a civilian building. And she needed somewhere to stay, well,  _now_ , pretty much.

Unfortunately, most of the places where she could move in immediately weren't cheap - which was why she was looking here, hoping to find a bargain amid the dross. She flipped through the advertisements people had left pinned on the board. Too expensive, no pets allowed, too expensive, no tenants with a history of property damage, too expensive...

Share houses were right out, of course. If her future was likely to involve shape shifting cats she'd probably need her privacy.

It wasn't until Itachi shifted uncomfortably that she realised she'd been rubbing her fingers nervously through his fur. "Sorry," she muttered, and pulled her hand away. It was easy - alarmingly easy, way too easy - to forget that the warm, soft-furred cat in her arms was actually a very dangerous person.

She tore a number strip off one of the posted notices - one from an Intel agent who would be out of the country for six months on a deep cover mission and was looking for somebody to sublet to while he was gone.

There was  _one_  benefit to having the cat, which was that she felt him tense well before she would have noticed Kakashi standing behind her otherwise.

"Saa... moving house?" he asked, and she had the great satisfaction of not even twitching in response to his silent closeness.

"Hi, Kakashi-sensei," she said instead of actually answering him. Then, after a second, "Yeah. Had a falling out with my landlord." That was, she decided, the most diplomatic way to say it. 'Falling out' sounded nothing like 'punched a hole in her wall' but honestly that was sort of the point, wasn't it? Nothing sounded less diplomatic than 'punched a hole in the wall'.

He offered his fingers politely for Itachi to sniff while he lazily eyed the notice board. Itachi just looked at them.

"Hm," said Kakashi.

"You probably smell like dog," Sakura suggested. There was pretty much nothing else on the notice board that could help her. She sighed, readjusted the cat, and turned around to... "Kakashi-sensei," she said slowly, interrupting her own train of thought, "you do know you have to turn the machine on, don't you?"

"Is that so?" he drawled.

Sakura frowned, but didn't press. Kakashi was a grown man and she was pretty certain he could figure out how laundry worked.

"There's always the ANBU barracks," he said, leaning back against one of the machines and letting his eye droop sleepily. He pulled out an Icha Icha novel and fixed his eye on it. He still had not tried to actually  _do_  his laundry. "You have clearance."

Technically that was true - as one of the medics who worked in debrief, she was privy to a lot of information that she wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. Sakura raised her eyebrows and ran her fingers down Itachi's furry spine before she realised, once again, what she was doing and stopped.

"Huh," she said slowly.

Kakashi reached over without lifting his gaze from his book and messed up her hair. She shot him a dirty look.

"Shit!"

Sakura's head jerked up - and so did Itachi's - in time to see Hagane pouting and whining about his injured hand. There was, predictably, a fat bloodied slice through the sensitive skin between thumb and forefinger.

"Senseeeiii," was the next thing he said.

"Friend of yours?" Kakashi asked cheerfully and obnoxiously.

Sakura completely ignored Hagane, but she caved when Kamizuki came and, looking terribly resigned, tried to persuade her to heal his friend.

"Ugh," she muttered, and went to fix his hand. She set Itachi down on the pitted wooden bench and held out her hands for Hakane's injured one.

"Phew, thanks Sakura-sensei-"

"You must know by now that I'm a medic, not a doctor," she said shortly, gripping his wrist and, with little concern for gentleness, burning cleaning and knitting the injury. "And-"

She cut herself off because there was a sudden, very unhappy growl. Sakura turned and glowered at one of the younger ninja, a blond-haired, brown-eyed kid with a crooked nose who was doing his level best to scratch Itachi's ears.

"Does it  _sound_  like he wants you to touch him?" she snapped, and he guiltily jerked his hand back.

"Sensei-"

Hagane had gone white from her grip on his hand. Guiltily, she soothed the bruises he was likely to get from her strength.

"You," she said, fixing her gaze on the ninja Hagane'd been playing with, "you need to improve your knife skills."

He scowled. "I don't see what bu-"

She clenched her fist and banged it on the bench, which gave an alarming groan. " _Did I stutter_?"

Silence descended. The washing machines were suddenly very loud.

"Right," he said quickly, staring at her like she was a monster.

Itachi climbed carefully but deftly up her arm until he could drape himself on her shoulder - incidentally well away from any handsy ninja.

An hour later, when she was pulling her clothing out of the machine, Kakashi had easily and cheerfully convinced one of the newer special jounin that he didn't understand how laundry worked in the slightest.

Sakura watched on, torn between outrage and awe, while he rubbed the back of his neck and laughed nervously and somehow persuaded the other ninja to pay for his laundry just by looking embarrassed and woebegone.

"Have you  _ever_  paid for your own laundry?" she murmured once the other - very helpful - was out of easy earshot.

He hummed, but he was contentedly reading his book and didn't really answer.

She paused. "Was it worth waiting that long to save a few coins?" she wondered.

He shot her an amused glance over his page.

Ah, of course. It wasn't  _about_  the coins. It was about being as obnoxious as possible. Sakura contemplated this during the dryer cycle and it took her mind off the difficulties she was currently facing. It was probably some kind of bonding experience for the new jounin by now:  _has Kakashi-senpai made you feel like an idiot yet? Yes? Good, you're one of us._

Given that he'd had one genin team only, Naruto and Sasuke would probably be minor celebrities when they finally made the cut...

"Mrow."

She blinked.

Itachi, perched on the seat next to her and still favouring his injured leg - out of a desire to seem more vulnerable and lure her into a sense of security with him or because he was actually still in pain, she wasn't sure - poked her with one dark paw and looked pointedly at the machines.

Ah.

Outside, the sun was setting. "Let's go," she said, standing and shaking out her laundry bag.

When she got home, she was completely unsurprised to find that Hidan, upon being allowed out of his cage, had ripped the shit out of her couch, knocked her crockery out of the drying rack to shatter upon the floor, and disappeared out the open balcony door.

Dammit.

Sakura rubbed her forehead but dismissed it. She'd clean after she got back from her shift. Instead, she dived into the shower, dressed herself with a slender modicum of professionalism and took off toward ANBU HQ at a jog.

When she got there - just on time - she found that Kakuzu had followed her, and seemed fully prepared to settle in and watch her work all night.

"Really?" she muttered, scowling at him even as she signed in. It wasn't like he could understand human language, so there was probably a lot of intel he wouldn't pick up, but... he was still a significant security threat. Not that she could  _explain_  that.

Then the first team came in and she wasn't paying attention to the cat anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anything that particularly appealed to you? Scenes or ideas you liked? Let me know with a comment. :)


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I felt like writing fucked up ANBU babies as well as Acatsuki, so here's some of both.

“Ram’s injured,” reported an ANBU with a really mean, grinning racoon dog mask. He had neat brown hair that dangled around his jaw and some very familiar scars on his hands, and even a brace of senbon, all of which Sakura pretended not to notice.

The medic station was a little-loved checkpoint between signing into ANBU HQ and getting to bed. Any ANBU returning from a mission had to pass through either the medic station - where they’d be assessed, healed of minor injuries and/or packed off to the hospital as necessary -- or the hospital on their way back to the barracks. It had been implemented ever since poor Horse-san had returned from a field op and nearly bled out on his own doorstep.

All of the operatives understood the importance of the process intellectually, but very few of them enjoyed it. Some of them were like Racoon-dog and would sensibly submit themselves to medical treatment when it was necessary. Others? Well...

Others were more like Ram.

The medic station was just past the sign-in desk. The exam table was cold metal, covered with plastic that Sakura could whip off and replace with a new sheet as necessary, and the lights were bright and big overhead, shining so there were no dark corners in which to hide.

Racoon-dog had managed to get Ram sitting on the table, which was a serious victory. The injury was on his back, strapped tightly with a compression bandage that Sakura supposed had been meant to stop the bleeding. It might have slowed it, at least.

“Hi there,” said Sakura, reaching for her latest examinee. Next to her, Racoon-dog tensed up. It was one of the stupidest dangers of this kind of work: fresh from field assignments, most of her patients were keyed up in some way, and most of them were very protective of their partners and team mates -- especially when injured. Did Racoon-dog want Ram to receive treatment? Oh, undoubtedly. Did he want Sakura touching Ram? No. Not at all.

She understood it intellectually, but it was an incredible pain in the butt and she had no sympathy for it professionally.

“It’s fine,” Ram was saying, “it’s just a tiny cut, I can barely feel it, it’s --” his voice flattened out, “ _don’t touch me_.”

“Ram, you’re bleeding through the dressings,” said Sakura patiently. “I can’t let you go home until I’ve seen to the injury. We can do it here or you can be taken to the hospital but it has to be done.”

Ram stared at her silently. It looked eerie in his mask, but Sakura was pretty sure he was just not going to speak -- not defiant or angry, but maybe just... nervous. Torn. Definitely not a happy little sheep.

“Do you want to be treated at the hospital?” she pressed. Sometimes they did -- the hospital had a ward for jounin and it was a safe place for people who felt out of control, for people who were habituated to acting in extreme violence and frightened of themselves. They could be assured of causing no damage there.

Ram was still silent, though, and since Sakura wasn’t allowed to see his face unless there was genuine, serious medical need that she couldn’t avoid by using chakra methods instead, she couldn’t really tell why. Her best bet was that he didn’t want treatment and was too stressed to decide.

She looked sideways at Racoon-dog. It was procedure to allow mission partners and team mates to be there -- being able to see the people they’d been on mission with was often soothing to the ANBU when they got confused, since an enemy village would never leave them together.

Her glance encompassed the filing cabinet and her eye was drawn to Kakuzu perched atop it. She wasn’t sure if he looked judgmental like that all the time, or if that was just because he was a cat. Or both.

“Do you know where you are?” Racoon-dog said after a moment, reaching out. He didn’t actually lay hands on Ram, and Sakura watched with narrowed eyes.

Ram didn’t say anything, so he kept talking. “You’re in the village. We’re home now. You’re in the medic station and you just have to let Haruno-san check the injury on your back and then we can get cleaned up and go to bed. It’s eleven o’clock at night.”

Ram was nodding, finally, but he didn’t seem inclined to do much else. He did take a grip on Racoon-dog’s hand. That was good. Probably. Maybe.

Sakura licked her teeth. “Come on. Racoon-dog’s still on the active roster,” because ANBU was brutal _and_ traumatic, as it happened, and he wasn't injured enough to get more than a day's rest, “if you don’t let someone treat you, he’ll be sent out with somebody else.”

Racoon-dog shifted uncomfortably next to her and Sakura ignored it. “Do you want somebody else to be watching his back, Ram-san?”

Racoon-dog twitched. “Haruno,” he hissed.

But ram was finally moving, tense and unhappy but turning so she could see the injury on his back. Finally. Where actual reason held no sway with him, appealing to the safety of his regular partner had. Konoha’s teamwork was one of its greatest strengths, but when you reached ANBU it got kind of... unhealthily codependent.

Ram’s muscles ticked when Sakura laid her hand upon the huge, scarred swell of his shoulder. He mumbled “ _Don’t touch me_ ,” like a reflex, and Sakura stopped there.

“Still with me?”

“Just _do_ it,” he said tightly, wire tense and deeply unhappy.

Right. She tried not to be offended. They were all rude bastards when they got in.

She brought a handful of glowing chakra to his back. The stab wound was not ‘just a tiny cut’ and if he could ‘barely feel it’ it was probably because his brain was spewing hormones to achieve that particular effect. It was crossed over the shadow of a previous stab wound, a scar in precisely the same place. He was so heavily muscled that he’d be a hard man to wound deeply, but two injuries in the same place were unlikely to be coincidence.

He flinched when she cleaned the wound with her buzzing chakra, and she tried to keep him grounded b talking.

“Your armour might need to be reinforced here,” she said in a soothing voice, and declined to point out that there was probably a weakness in his style somewhere, too. He already knew, and she was trying to keep him with her, not annoy him.

“Yeah,” he said, sounding strained, “might have to talk to the quartermaster about that one.”

“She’ll eat you alive,” predicted Racoon-dog cheerfully.

“Almost done,” Sakura told them. Ram stayed steady once her charka was on him, listening and responding with a strained voice that said a lot about how hard he was finding it. It seemed to help that Racoon-dog still had a steady grip on his hand.

The wound was deep but narrow, so she made sure the clotting had taken hold properly and then used strips to tape it rather than stitching it, which felt beyond lucky -- she hadn’t had either of them pull a weapon or stop responding to her entirely, but she wasn’t sure how they’d hold up against a needle.

Luckier still, she got them processed and supplied the painkillers Ram would need but probably not take (which she gave to him in full and obvious view of Racoon-dog) well before any more arrivals made it to her station.

She helped Ram slap a waterproof seal over the whole wound before they headed in, which would last long enough for him to shower at least, and then signed them off. “Thanks for your hard work,” said Racoon-dog, sounding exhausted. Ram said nothing at all, but Sakura hardly expected him to.

“Fascinating, right?” she asked Kakuzu while she filled out their paperwork. He stared intently at her, and even came over to squint at her papers. He seemed annoyed to not be able to read whatever she was doing.

“It’s not actually exciting,” she promised.

She had just enough time to get her brief report on the two ANBU sorted out and shoved away before the second arrival of her evening showed up -- another team of two.

This one was an eighteen year old intel agent and a handler. The field agent was pretty, with dark careless hair and very green eyes and en enormous amount of makeup. Sakura wasn’t sure that much makeup was actually necessary because the agent was quite beautiful without most of it, but it was probably a subculture thing. Sometimes intel agents had to dress up.

This one was a lot easier than Ram had been. He cracked unhappy jokes and couldn’t seem to sit still and he had unsteady hands, but all up he was at least very much present and exhibited no confusion at all as to what was going on in the moment. His handler was almost a non-entity, a subdued, dark-clothed body with a boar mask who nearly never moved -- except when she requested sleeping aids for her charge.

“I don’t need them,” said the field agent in the hardest voice she’d heard from him.  
  
Behind him, over his shoulder, the handler made the field sign for _yes_ , and then, _move out._ It didn’t quite translate directly, but her meaning was clear.

Sakura pulled up the medication and noted it against his report -- given, unlikely to be used. “If you don’t want them, you don’t have to take them,” she said placidly. “Nobody can make you take them without an injunction from psych,” she added, which, well, _technically_. “Just have them on hand, all right?”

The handler held out her hand, and Sakura ignored her completely to deliver the medication to the field agent. He shoved the tiny bottle away somewhere in about a third of a second.

His handler looked annoyed, from the set of her shoulders, which was...

None of Sakura’s business, actually. Maybe they had things to work out on their own. She noted the weird dynamic and signed him out.

After her second report was written, the space was cleaned up and the used sheeting and instruments tossed in the ‘hazard’ bins, Sakura ended up compounding some of the simpler medicines they were low on. Kakuzu sat on the filing cabinet and watched her the whole time in absolute silence, and she wondered if he was bored. Or hungry.

The others probably were, at least, and she doubted their ability to get much in the way of food on their own -- oh, they could probably hunt it if they wanted to, but that left them with either fish from the river or whatever they could track down inside Sakura’s apartment building.

She was pretty sure there was some salted salmon in the fridge, and she was also pretty sure that Itachi or Hidan would figure out how to open it, but...

They didn’t have the chakra systems of little cats. They probably needed a lot of food.

It was looking ready to be an okay shift, actually, when her fourth group came in. There were four of them, three agents in masks and one huge black-furred dog. The dog, Sakura assumed, belonged to the short woman with the clawed fingers. She had a buzz cut and a stocky, dense build, the way some people got when they did a lot of intensely acrobatic short-range techniques.

It was immediately obvious to Sakura that the other two of the human agents had been Root at some point in their careers. They were stiff and blank and painfully inept at dealing with their comrade. One of them had a mask like a bull, the other like a hummingbird, and that was basically the extent of the differences between them as far as Sakura could tell. Their body language and their vocal inflections were curiously homogenous.

Even worse, it became quickly clear that their team mate had gotten her right arm and ribs burned to shit in trying to get one of them back to safety. Her dog was Yamimaru, and he clearly felt that his partner wasn’t being appreciated appropriately for what she’d done to help them. The ninja herself was wearing a grinning Weasel mask, and she wasn’t very helpful-- although Sakura was willing to give her a free pass on that because of the injuries.

“You’ll probably have to go to hospital,” she admitted, “but let me see anyway -- if it’s not as bad as it looks I can patch it up and book you in for tomorrow instead.”

“It was an unnecessary injury,” said one of the idiot ex-Root agents, the one in the bull mask. “There was a forty per cent chance that Hummingbird would retai full use of his eyes had the attack struck him --”

Yamimaru growled, curling his huge body around his partner. His tail brushed her ribs easily.

“He’s growling again,” said Hummingbird serenely.

Sakura rubbed her hand through her hair, then realised what she’d done and had to change her gloves again.

“Weasel, on the table,” she demanded. The Inuzuka lady hesitated in exactly the way Ram had, but she got up there in the end. Yamimaru slunk to one side, wriggled beneath the table and came up on the other side, right near Sakura. After a moment’s assessing stare at her, he put his paws upon the table’s plastic sheeting, standing on his hind legs to get a better view.

Weasel’s burns didn’t reach her face, but Sakura would probably end up drawing on a fair bit of her chakra and she wanted to see her eyes to make sure their pupils were still even when they were done. “Mask off when you’r ready,” she instructed. “I’m going to cut some of this away to see how bad it is,” she added, so nobody was too startled when she came at the injury on the woman’s ribs with her scissors.

“There would have been fewer agents injured,” said Bull, “if Weasel had not returned for Hummingbird, and that failure of judgment must be reported--”

Yamimaru’s bulk slammed into Sakura’s leg when he went for Bull’s throat. She yelped and threw the scissors down rather than risk stabbing her patient in an existing wound.

Her dog’s sudden howling fury sent Weasel into a panic, and she lashed out wildly.

Sakura almost didn’t see the elbow come flying at her face, and when she dodged it was by a tiny margin. She felt the passing of the woman’s elbow on her nose.

Bull made one low indignant noise. There was a meaty _thump_ and the scraping of big canine claws on the cement floor. A flare of wild chakra let Sakura know that Hummingbird had gotten involved. The ex-Root agents were calm and rational and prepared to accept orders from pretty much any authority they recognised as legitimate (most of the time), but they were still veterans and, like most veteran ninja, when certain triggers were tripped they started killing.

Sakura dodged a clawed swipe from Weasel and dropped her with a handful of medical chakra, taking her most vulnerable patient neatly out of the fight. The shadowy forms of the other two ninja twisted and dodged acrobatically around Yamimaru, who was clearly trying to take a second chunk out of Bull.

“Hey,” said Sakura. She wasn’t sure she’d get anywhere just yelling at them, but it was much better than the alternative. “HEY.”

Hummingbird, at least, steadied at her yell and she took that opportunity to point him out of the room. “Go. Wait outside and _stay there_.”

She turned her back for less than a second to ensure he obeyed her and that was when Yamimaru jumped at her.

Sakura went down under a hundred and forty pounds of heavy muscle and fur, and she hit the ground like a sack of cement and slammed her chin into the floor. For a quarter second she saw stars behind her closed eyelids, and then there was hot breath on the back of her skull and her heart rate skyrocketed --

Yamimaru yelped and spun around, suddenly distracted by something else. His claws ripped into her back and thighs and Sakura used his distraction to lever herself up, force him off balance with her hip and then turn and slam him into the concrete with a knee in his furry back and one hand upon his neck.

Silence descended.

Sakura could hear her own laboured breathing and Yamimaru’s panting. She wasn’t about to let him up, however still he seemed. “...right,” she said. She exhaled. Her breath was slowing.  
“Medic-san,” said Bull cautiously, “is that your nin-cat?”

Sakura looked to the table where Kakuzu was staring Bull down, a pair of glowering green eyes in all that ragged dark fur. There was blood smeared all over his paws, and, when she looked, also upon Yamimaru’s tail.

That certainly explained the distraction.

“Bull-san,” said Sakura sweetly, “I think now would be a good time for you to stop talking.”

He seemed very confused, but in the end he did as he was told.

Sakura sunk another tendril of glowing green chakra into Yamimaru’s dense furry skull, sending him drooling into unconsciousness before she lets him up. It was lot more than she used on Hidan that first time, and he’d probably feel floppy and stupid for at least twenty four hours. She couldn’t find it in herself to feel especially sympathetic.

It took her only a few minutes to assess, clean and re-dress Weasel’s injuries now that she and her nin-dog were unconscious. It was theoretically more difficult to treat patients who weren’t conscious to provide sensory feedback, but Sakura sincerely preferred both of these two unconscious. Of the ex-Root agents, only Hummingbird was injured, and that was just the burn on his ear and neck that had caught and held on even after Weasel had interrupted.

Sakura was exhausted by the time her last team came in for the night, and very little of it had to do with the chakra she’d expended.

Kakashi was solo, which was depressing. Solo missions for ANBU had bad odds. On the other hand, he was home and he was her most cooperative patient of the shift -- and if that wasn’t saying something, she didn’t know what was.

“Short mission?” she enquired, because she’d seen him just that afternoon, casually trolling new jounin at the laundromat. It had to have been nearby.

Kakashi took his mask off almost immediately -- the Hound one, anyway. The other one stayed on.

“You look like you’ve had an exciting night,” he said, hopping up on the table and swinging his legs while Sakura pulled on new gloves.

“An Inuzuka got upset tried to chew on me. Headache?” she prompted. It was usually a headache with Kakashi, because he really was not adapted to that eye.

He hummed, and she started her many diagnostic jutsu. The chakra pathways around his eyes were swollen and raw-feeling to her senses. There wasn’t much she could do with that -- certainly nothing with her chakra, which would likely just exacerbate the problem. She could deaden the pain receptors in his brain, but even her chakra control wasn’t that perfect. She’d probably make his whole face numb.

“Don’t use it for a couple of days,” she advised uselessly. He nodded, but she knew he’d use it when he thought he had to and not hesitate in the slightest.

She moved on to the busted nerves in his hand, fried up by the raikiri. Her shift was almost over, so she took her time with the other cuts and bruises because she could, and then tried transfusing a little extra chakra into his circulatory system. “Get some rest, sensei,” she advised finally, and then, “and some _food_ ,” in a much harder tone. She could feel his reserves with her diagnostic jutsu -- and his ribs just with her hands. There was lean and then there was too-lazy-to-eat. 

“Hai, hai...” he trailed off, getting up and stretching. Sakura sighed. It was satisfying to be here to make sure he was well when he got home, in a way. It meant she could be the first to see him and it eased her mind... even when he was out on stupid solo missions. Maybe especially then. She signed him off.

“Ah,” he said suddenly.

Sakura looked up. “Mm?”

And then quite unceremoniously, Kakashi reached into his pack and withdrew... a cat. A whole cat. From his bag.

"Has that been in there the whole time?" Sakura gestured with her pen. The cat flailed in uncoordinated rage at Kakashi until he set it down on the table.

“Maa, I heard you were collecting nin-cat.” He looked toward Kakuzu where he was settled on the filing cabinet with his front paws dangling over the edge -- he still had not cleaned the blood from his paws. He looked very fierce, and also a bit deranged.

His green eyes blinked at the new arrival. He stood up. A second later his bloodied paws hit the examination table.

The new cat was big, longhaired and ginger with severe scarring all over the left side of its face. When it saw Kakuzu it stared at him with huge dark eyes.

A second later it reached forward, inching toward him with its pink nose. It looked like a friendly gesture.

So of course Kakuzu lifted one paw and smacked it against the other cat’s face.

The ginger yowled and flailed one of its own paws until it could get away.

“Yeah. Thanks sensei... He’ll fit right in,” sighed Sakura.

Kakashi patted her head with one gloved hand and when he turned to glare at him he was gone.

The ginger cat barrelled into her hand at the earliest opportunity and rubbed its face all over her fingers, purring like a freight train. Sakura blinked down at the huge, rumbling cat and tried to reconcile his behaviour with a fierce missing nin.

Kakuzu heaved a huge, put upon sigh. He wandered carefully across the examination table, jumped to a wall-mounted counter and tiptoed into the sink.

Sakura watched for three seconds while he examined the taps. She wasn’t sure if she should try to help him -- which he probably needed -- or try to allow him to do things on his own -- which he also probably needed. Then, hesitantly, he balanced on his hind paws and twisted one with his front. The water came spraying hard from the tap and hit him in the shoulder. It knocked him over into the sink and he came up growling angrily.

The big ginger stared at Kakuzu. His tail ticked. He tilted his head. After a second he started to make a soft wheezing noise.

Sakura had to cast a diagnostic jutsu before she realised he was laughing. Cats, it turned out, were not really equipped to find things humorous like humans did.

“You’re so mean,” Sakura whispered, and if the cat understood her -- all indicators pointed to them not understanding human language when they were in cat form -- he didn’t indicate it.

The last twenty minutes of Sakura’s shift were happily dead-silent, so she was allowed to watch the cats. Kakuzu seemed to find balancing difficult in his cat body, but he was surprisingly deft with the small and calculated movements. Watching him try to clean his paws off was fascinating.

Sakura traded off with a bespectacled Branch-house Hyuuga at about four in the morning, and then, blinking blearily, she headed further in to see what the ANBU barracks actually looked like.

There were four rooms standing empty on the ground floor, and they were... small. There was enough room for a bed in one corner, and there was a tiny area on the other side with a sink and a bench that lined the wall. The floor was cement the whole way through the place, which would make it easy to mop... or to hose down, she supposed.

She’d have to get rid of most of her furniture, or pay through the nose for storage. One of the rooms had a potted cactus standing by the window. It had been left long enough to die.

Kakuzu had followed her in soft-pawed silence, but the ginger nosed into every corner of the room then perched on the bench and meowed loudly and plaintively at her before staring at the desiccated cactus like he was personally offended.

“Yeah, well,” sighed Sakura, “that’s life sometimes.”

He meowed again, louder.

“Maybe it’ll be a last resort,” she muttered. But she only had a day, so it wasn't looking like a very distant last resort.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you _know_ who Racoon-dog and Ram are, don't even. 
> 
> Anything you really liked? Let me know in a comment! :)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Look, sometimes we update things. 
> 
> 2\. Warning for very brief mention of suicide

Sakura returned home shortly before dawn, tired but only a little battered. Kakuzu followed her from the rooftops and glowered down at her as she made her way back to her apartment. He was completely soundless, just a black silhouette against a still-dark sky.

Konoha was quiet at this time of the morning - as quiet as it ever was, anyway. A few all-night stores glowed brightly, and once or twice Sakura caught the flash of bone-white and a flicker of chakra that meant ANBU as they raced over roofs and along the wiring that zigzagged madly between the tallest buildings. Other than those, though, pretty much everyone was indoors and the streets were cool, dark and deserted.

The new cat leapt down from her bags and walked with her, sniffing at things and crossing her path as he went. He had absolutely no respect for where she might be putting her feet, and walking with him criss-crossing her path was more of a test of her reflexes than she'd have liked to admit.

Sakura climbed the steps to her apartment slowly, pulled her key out and then thought better of it. The door was a pain in the butt and stuck sometimes and the lock was loud and finicky - and there was a convenient hole in the wall right there, so she brushed aside the sheet pinned over it and climbed through instead. She could smell the plaster dust. More than anything else, that made her feel tired and a bit defeated.

The big ginger cat didn't even blink at the giant hole in the wall, he just climbed right in after. It was somehow a relief to Sakura to see Hidan sprawled across her old couch, getting fur all over everything. His pale fur picked up the light from the streetlight outside and he glowed, easily the brightest thing in the room. He didn't open his eyes, but one fluffy white ear flicked deliberately in her direction when she stepped in and went to turn on a light.

Itachi was perched on the balcony railing outside, and only became visible when the overhead light flooded the place. He seemed intent upon the quiet street below.

Sakura was entirely ready just to shower and sleep, but after a conflicted second she remembered that these guys didn't actually have opposable thumbs and she should probably feed them.

She hesitated for a moment, but, with an unhappy sigh, Sakura made a pot of tea and left it to steep while she examined the inside of her refrigerator. She could leave them to fend for themselves, find their own food, but - well. Who knew what they'd get up to doing that? No, better to put her mediocre cooking skills to work.

And, well, Kakuzu was probably the reason she wasn't a patient herself right now. He hadn't tackled the Inuzuka hound out of the goodness of his own heart, but he hadn't _had_ to do it, either.

Reciprocity was a thing.

...probably.

Her fridge was uninspiring. She'd been out to get groceries already, but she'd not planned on feeding so many mouths. At least now she knew she'd empty the fridge before she had to move.

Sakura wasn't a good cook. Sasuke was, in fact, the best cook on their genin team, with Kakashi coming in a distant second and Sakura hovering somewhere around third only because Naruto thought every meal could be made of noodles. She didn't have the knack for it, and her food only really came out well when she was following a good, specific recipe. For herself, she usually kept it simple.

Cooking for four of these guys with their huge chakra stores was probably not going to be pretty. But even when they were human they seemed to turn back abruptly, which wasn't conducive to unburned food. She wasn't sure she trusted them enough to eat anything one of them had prepared either.

Of course she contemplated dumping poison into the pot even as she pulled ingredients from her fridge. She could disguise it with spices and bid good riddance to the lot of them, that way.

It was mostly the likelihood of her being caught at it that stopped her - there was a strong chance at least one of them would notice. Sakura had to sleep _some_ time, and those claws were very sharp. She remembered vividly that Hidan's had gone right through the metal table top at the veterinary clinic.

A much smaller part of Sakura didn't want to kill Kakuzu after he'd helped her, and the same part wasn't so hot on poisoning unsuspecting people in her own home. She frowned as she sliced up an onion, ignoring the sting in her eyes and wondering if these soft, un-ninjalike parts of her were using her more practical concerns about getting caught as an excuse.

Well. It didn't matter. She wasn't going to try the poison, she'd made that decision. She didn't really have that much sitting about anyway...

Behind her there was a breath of displaced air. Sakura could see the looming shadow of a man emerge, streamed upon the wall by the lights. She forced herself not to turn around and look because she was logically not in much danger and she had no interest in seeing any more genitals than she had to if she could possibly help it.

"Do you need any help?" he asked. It was not the voice Sakura had been expecting and when she turned in surprise, she found Itachi, not Kakuzu. He had, blessedly, found a pair of Kakashi-sensei's old trousers - ones with a slice up the leg that left his kneecap bare if he wore them, if Sakura remembered rightly. Itachi was a little shorter, a bit leaner. It was torn all the way up to his thigh.

"Not really," she said cautiously, keeping an eye out while he sipped from his cup. He must have poured it after the change, she decided, because she couldn't contemplate the logistics otherwise. Did he drink from the pot, then, or...?

She dumped her chopped vegetables into a big iron pan of hot oil and pulled out her rice cooker. Should she have done that first? She squinted for a second, wondering how long the vegetables would take to cook, and if they'd be overcooked or cold by the time the rice was done. Hmm. Whatever, it'd be fine.

"Mm. You have blood on your neck," he added, making her slap one hand over the back of her neck self-consciously. Her fingers came away with some smeared dried blood, but - not a lot. It was just a graze. Really, the bruises were probably much more significant.

She thought about gathering the chakra to disinfect and heal it, but honestly it would go on its own and she was tired.

"Just work," she said, rinsing her fingers off before she got dried blood in their dinner. Breakfast? ...Food. In their food.

This conversation was so mild and domestic. The savoury smells of cooking rose in the air while she exchanged pleasantries with a missing-nin in the kitchen corner of her apartment. It was completely surreal.

She felt very distant and detached.

"This person. His name is Tobi," said Itachi after a few moments' silence, and when Sakura looked back she could see that the big ginger tabby had climbed the table and was looking uncertainly at the tea pot. He didn't seem to want to drink.

Sakura's eyes went from the tomcat to Itachi and back. They kept returning to Itachi, who looked tired and a little strained but mostly calm - and half naked. There was something absurdly compelling about the hollow of his throat, the dip of a clavicle.

Nipples, said her brain cheerfully, and Sakura dragged her eyes back to the cat with something of an effort.

Tobi stared at her unblinkingly and, when he was sure he had her attention, he tilted his head to one side and let out a soft rumbly meow.

Sakura tilted her head too...

...and the cat kept going. Tilted his head more. A little more. And more, until his pointed face and pink nose were almost parallel to the tabletop. And then he tilted his whole body to follow and flopped to his side on the table.

He flailed one soft paw and meowed loudly at her.

She eyed him. She was kind of at a loss as to how to interpret that. His belly was a pristine white, as were his big fluffy paws.

"Hi," she said awkwardly, and offered her hand. She was pretty sure that was what you were meant to do for dogs, but she wasn't sure what else was polite. None of her kunoichi classes had prepared her for the etiquette of meeting a reasonably nonhostile missing nin trapped in the body of a large fluffy cat.

"He doesn't like tea," said Itachi, taking another carefully timed sip.

"...does he dislike tea more than he dislikes being a cat?" she wondered. Tobi had declined to politely sniff at her fingers, but he was watching them avidly, tail ticking while he stared.

"I can only assume so," Itachi murmured.

One of Tobi's white-tipped paws lashed out, lightning fast, and smacked her fingers, but his claws were safely retracted. He paused, and she blinked, and then he batted at her again before rolling to his feet.

"He has adapted surprisingly well to being a cat," Itachi said, although his expression was impassive.

Sakura tugged her fingers out from under Tobi's paw. "At least he's not injured," she murmured, before turning back to the stove.

Some of the vegetables were sticking to the pan a bit, because she'd gotten distracted. Ugh.

"Sorry," she said when she was done mangling their meal. The rice cooker beeped when it was finished so at least she knew that part would be properly cooked. "Cooking isn't really one of my strengths."

She took a plate for herself, then, considering the sheer amount of mass and chakra these guys were maintaining, she replenished the tea pot and got out of the way. She settled on the couch instead, contemplating the hole in her wall.

Kakuzu appeared from the shadows between the top of her pantry and the ceiling, paws making a heavy _thump_ on the table when he landed. He stuck his nose into Itachi's cup for a second and then emerged, huge, scarred, muscled and -

Actually, with the amount of _naked_ missing nin butt that had been all over Sakura's furniture recently, she was thinking about burning it. It wasn't like any of it was liable to fit into the ANBU barracks anyway, and this way she wouldn't have to pay for storage.

Hidan had cracked one huge eye open when she settled onto the couch and brought the scent of food with her, and now he looked over at her. After a second he stretched, flexing his claws and spine, and rolled to his feet.

"That's mine," Sakura said, pushing him away from her plate.

He hissed.

She rolled her eyes and pointed toward the stove.

He followed her gesture, sniffed, and went to get his own like that had been the plan all along.

"You are a seriously shitty cook," he said as soon as he'd shifted forms and snatched up a pair of chopsticks. He used them more like a shovel than like chopsticks. It was sort of gross, but also sort of funny.

"Food is food," said Kakuzu flatly. "It's free and nutritionally adequate. Stop complaining."

"Yeah, well, this is _shitty_ food," Hidan repeated.

Itachi had marginally better manners, but since Sakura knew for a fact he wasn't raised by wild wolves or something, that stood to reason. She wasn't so sure about Hidan. She could see Tobi-san acrobatically swiping food from his plate whenever Itachi didn't seem to be paying attention.

It was all... oddly and alarmingly domestic.

She chose to ignore Hidan's complaining. She was getting the distinct impression that he just liked complaining.

"Alright. Two things," Sakura said once the feeding frenzy had died down slightly, which meant Hidan was scratching the slightly-charred bits of vegetables from the sides of the pan and whining. "First, I don't really have anywhere else to move to and I'm being evicted so I'm moving into the ANBU barracks for the time being."

Itachi made a thoughtful noise. "Are you one of their in-house medics, Sakura-san?"

That was an indirect way of saying he thought she wasn't good enough to actually _be_ ANBU.

Which... was true. Technically. Although ANBU drew from all ranks, they didn't take genin or chuunin unless there was a very good reason. Sakura was good for a chuunin and growing stronger, but her field skills weren't the usual ANBU ones, and they weren't good enough or unique enough to get her recruited in spite of that.

If she continued to get stronger, it was pretty even odds whether or not they'd try to recruit her as a field medic, but... basically Itachi's assessment was solid, even if it was a little rude.

"Yes," she said, ignoring the smiling, insinuating _hmmm_ Hidan made around his chopsticks when she answered. "Which is lucky, because I'd be sleeping on somebody's couch otherwise."

"I don't suppose the barracks have gotten any bigger," Itachi mused.

"No." Kakuzu grunted and poured himself another cup of tea. Of them, he and Tobi had been there for her brief inspection, and he was the only one of those in human form and capable of communication.

"Ah," murmured Itachi.

"Second thing," Hidan said. He made an impatient gesture, rolling his fingers at her like she was taking too long on purpose.

Sakura ground her teeth. As far as she could tell, if there was a way in any situation for Hidan to be obnoxious and irritating, he would find it. "Right. I want to get some scans of you. Our equipment won't let me take images from the time of your transformation, but I can get images of you in cat form."

"Images," repeated Kakuzu.

Sakura ran her hands through her hair. "I've been thinking about it. I want to start with comparing your structures in cat form to those of regular cats-"

"Well, that's stupid," muttered Hidan.

She shot him a withering look. "The things about you that are different from regular cats are going to be the things that make you _not regular cats_ ," she pointed out.

"I _know_ that. In case you hadn't noticed, there's kind of a lot of us that's not like 'regular cats', what the hell good is that going to do you?"

Sakura scowled and just decided to ignore him. At least Itachi and Kakuzu were still paying attention. She cleared her throat. "All my diagnostic jutsu - and Tsunade-sama's, too - are coming back saying that once you're in cat bodies, you're basically cats. I want to run some tests to find the discrepancies."

Hana had already given her the idea, to be honest. When she'd first inspected Kakuzu for how oddly clumsy he was as a cat - which Sakura now suspected to be a problem adapting to his new shape, since he certainly wasn't clumsy as a human - she'd suggested that the only real way to tell why it was happening was through a series of scans.

It was a starting point, at least, and would provide a really good excuse when Sakura booked out certain equipment for her new summons.

On the other hand... it was sort of lucky that she was being evicted, because ANBU barracks were cheap to live in, and medical testing could be very expensive. Cats weren't exactly covered under village medical care - not even summons. She understood there was some kind of clan tithing system in place among the Inuzuka for their canines, but that was about it.

"That's it," she said, wearied by the thought. "I'm going to bed."

And when she got up, she'd... move half of her stuff to storage and cram the rest into a tiny semi-functional studio, probably.

There was one benefit to being completely exhausted: she slept like the dead, even though she was stressed and there was a hole in her wall and Hidan was louder than an evacuation alarm.

When she woke up around midday, her apartment was quiet enough that she could hear the daytime sounds of the street outside. Her eyes still felt faintly gritty. There was a warm lump next to her hip, rumbling faintly, and it took Sakura a second to remember she was living with four people who were currently cat shaped.

After a second, she sat up and peered down at the lump.

Sakura was immediately relieved to find it was not Hidan. She wasn't sure how she'd have felt had it been Kakuzu or Itachi, either, but she was definitely relieved it was not Hidan.

This was the one she hadn't actually met in human form, Tobi. She stared at him and tried to figure out if she should be annoyed.

On the one hand, a missing nin had crawled into her bed in the middle of the night.

On the other hand, an adorable cat had crawled into her bed in the middle of the night. It wasn't like he'd hurt her, and she hadn't woken up to him doing anything creepy. He was probably just cold. Cats weren't big.

As soon as she moved, the fuzzy ball uncurled, rolling over and baring his white belly in a huge, limb-trembling stretch. Then he curled back in, paws batting at nothing, and cracked his eyes open to peer back at her.

Something in her melted.

That was...

That was _not fair_.

He was awful and manipulative and _shamefully obvious_. And worse, it was working.

"...I'm onto you," she said.

"Mrr?" He tipped his head. One large ginger ear twitched.

Oh, for - Spitefully, she knocked him off her bed and to the floor. He landed on his feet and darted beneath her bed with an injured yowl like she'd actually hurt him.

Ignoring the cat's dramatics, she stumbled away from her bed and into the bathroom. When she opened the door, Hidan hissed at her and sped out of the bathroom in a streak of white fur, leaving tiny claw-shaped furrows in the tiles.

Sakura ignored this completely and shut the door after herself with a bang. She stripped and slumped against the cool tiled wall of her shower, half-awake.

The hot water was good. For about thirty seconds she discarded all difficult thoughts about housing and money and enjoyed the water pressure.

Her eyes drifted toward the floor. Hidan's claw marks were nothing on the hole in the wall, she decided. It wasn't like she was getting her goddamned bond back anyway, was it?

...At least the ANBU barracks would take her no matter what her rental history looked like.

With that cheerful thought in mind and marginally more awake, she headed for the kitchen.

Kakuzu was dozing with half his ragged body hunched beneath a pillow in her living room, and Itachi was perched on the railing of her tiny balcony, staring down at the street below. Hidan was nowhere to be found, which probably accounted for the quiet.

Astonishingly, somebody had actually done the dishes last night even after she'd staggered off to bed - excepting a lone tea cup left out on the bench. She suspected Itachi, because he was the only one who'd shown any signs of not being raised entirely by wild animals, but decided not to bring it up. The idea of Uchiha Itachi doing dishes in her apartment was... stressful.

The whole day was going to be stressful, probably. Sakura let her eyes drift to the clock.

Time to get moving.

First was a brief - very brief - meeting with Shizune, who she caught during the last twenty minutes of her shift at the hospital. Sakura fell into step with her in the corridor, explained in a rush, and shoved her application toward the other woman without pausing for breath.

"Oh," said Shizune, and signed her application following a single glance to ensure it was, in fact, an application to the ANBU barracks. "That's such a shame about your apartment. This is room four-oh-one, isn't it... Do you mind looking in on Inuzuka Hideki in four-oh-seven?"

Sakura, having secured her endorsement, did not mind. She looked in on Hideki, and it was only when the huge ragged dog lurched out from beneath his bed and growled low in his throat at the window that Sakura realised she had a follower.

Tobi was... outside, on the fourth floor windowsill, cleaning one paw with absolutely zero concern for the menacing Inuzuka canine inching toward him.

"How did you even get out there?" Sakura wondered blankly. Even if he could have understood her in this form, he probably couldn't hear her through the window.

Unconcerned, he switched paws.

How had he even gotten up that high? When she left the building, Sakura looked up at the windows, trying to figure out where a cat might find purchase to climb up there on the outside - but it didn't seem likely.

...Did they really have that kind of chakra control as cats?

Hidan certainly didn't seem to...

Puzzled, she moved on to ANBU HQ, where she just needed approval from the ANBU commander before she could move herself into her new one-room apartment. (For a value of 'one room apartment' that meant 'tiny soulless box'.)

About half a second later, a large ginger ball wound itself between her ankles and tripped her, sending her stumbling three steps forward and windmilling her arms to keep her balance.

"Meow!" he yowled cheerfully.

Sakura scowled down at him. She wasn't completely sure she _wanted_ to meet Tobi in person.

He tripped her three more times on the way and eventually she scooped him up and carried him. He went limp and floppy when she did. This may, she decided, have been his goal all along, because he began to purr ridiculously, rumbling along like a small earthquake.

The ANBU Commander's office was dusty and completely spotless. There were no files hanging around, no papers floating, and probably no bottles of rice wine hidden in the drawer with the ink stones...

Dozaka - real name eternally unknown, although she wore a cat mask - looked at Sakura through a fall of improbably fluffy brown hair and rubbed her forehead.

"Evicted, huh... Well, we had a suicide on the second floor last week," she shrugged. "You can take that one."

Behind her, Tobi was on his back legs, soft paws gently pressed to the side of a big metal filing cabinet.

"...Aa," said Sakura awkwardly. "Does that, er, happen often?" Her role in ANBU's in-house medic station meant that she saw agents coming off field assignments, but she was almost never their regular medic.

"Sometimes," shrugged Dozaka. "It's number 204," she said, scrawling an illegible signature at the bottom of Sakura's rushed application. "His stuff's cleared out, so you can move in any time." Her gaze sharpened. "How many cats do you have, exactly?"

Sakura felt a nervous twitch happen somewhere in the vicinity of her left eyelid. She was very aware that Tobi had managed to open a drawer of Dozaka's filing cabinet and was staring, annoyed, at its contents. "A few," she said.

"Huh. Well, there are some dog summons around, so keep an eye on them." Tobi took a cautious step into the drawer, and then another, until he had been entirely swallowed by the drawer now, and only his orange tail was visible, ticking back and forth in the air.

"Of course," she said with a fixed smile. "They're pretty well-behaved." She was, of course, lying right through her teeth.

After a moment's rummaging in her desk, Dozaka located and handed over a key. "Well -"

There was a metallic clang, a surprised yelp, and then a _thump_.

Dozaka peered over her shoulder.

Tobi wiggled out from under the toppled filing cabinet, darted past Dozaka's desk and slunk around Sakura's feet.

"Um," said Sakura. She laughed nervously, rubbing the back of her neck, and used all of her long-trained self control to stem the desire to kick Tobi in the face. He peered around her ankles cautiously.

"...if those files had spilt," said the ANBU Commander mildly, "I'd be using him as a rug right now."

Sakura was fairly certain Dozaka was _not_ joking. She took her key and her signed paperwork, slung one arm around Tobi's fluffy middle and got out of there before she could change her mind.

"Thanks," she called over her shoulder, shutting the door after her.

"Moron!" she hissed at Tobi, flicking one of his huge ears. He growled in the back of his throat and flattened the ear to his head.

Despite her misgivings, number 204 was almost identical to the rooms she'd seen on the ground floor: a dull concrete floor with a drain in one slightly dipped corner, one bench with a sink and a single stove element in the corner, a built-in cupboard and one overhead light fixture with a bright fluorescent tube light. Behind a door was what she supposed was technically a bathroom, although she could cross it in about half a step - there was a toilet jammed into one corner with a sink jutting out right next to it, and beside that was the world's most miniscule shower.

Still, it was somewhere to live.

Tobi looked upon it with an unhappy expression on his scarred kitty face.

Whatever. Freeloaders didn't get votes.

Moving all her things over was a pain.

(It was such a pain, in fact, that she seriously contemplated waking up Naruto just so she could get him to move her in a flood of bright orange shadow clones. Unfortunately, she was pretty sure Naruto didn't have access clearance to ANBU HQ, which would just mean having a bunch of shadow clones dropping her stuff off outside the building, which... she could do herself, without having to bribe anybody in ramen. Pity.)

Firstly, she had to to determine what she could and could not actually take. She tended to collect a great many unnecessary things - potted plants, cute cups, clothes she never wore, that sort of thing - which made moving to a much smaller place difficult.

She ended up taking essentials only: bed, crockery, mission gear, clothing, towels, personal necessities. The ANBU room was probably more designed for a tiny neat little bar fridge and her full size one stuck out awkwardly in one corner - but it was a perfectly functional fridge and she wasn't getting rid of it. Those things were expensive.

The rest of her things went into storage.

"It's often used by shinobi on long term missions," said the oily proprietor, a civilian who charged an absurd amount of money for a medium-size storage unit in the middle of nowhere, "so the service is in high demand."

"I see," said Sakura, which was a frightfully untrue statement. She did not see. There was no call to charge this much for storing furniture.

She signed the agreement anyway, because she really had nowhere else to put her things right now. Maybe sometime soon she'd visit her mother and see how much room was left in her childhood bedroom. She cringed at the thought - _there_ was a visit she'd been putting off for months.

Or... or, maybe Sasuke had room in the giant, sprawling Uchiha complex? He probably did... 

Sakura pictured that conversation.

Maybe not so much.

No.

Probably not.

She considered the pricetag of storing her furniture again.

...Maybe she _would_ ask her mother.

Or maybe she'd just sell it.

By the end of the day, despite a frightful lack of organisation on her behalf, Sakura had moved herself from one home to another, squashier, much more depressing one.

She looked around.

With her bed and the smallest writing table jammed inside, the place seemed even tinier.

"Well," she said with forced cheer, perching on the edge of her bed and curling her legs under her. "This is it!"

Two scarred feline faces turned toward her with an air of overwhelming disdain, as though her cheerful tone was transparent even to them. She still wasn't sure where Hidan was, and Itachi had disappeared at some point during the last dash between her apartment and the storage facility on the edge of town.

She ground her teeth. Great, now the cats were judging her. "You get what you pay for, guys."

Neither Tobi nor Kakuzu so much as twitched.

She scowled down at them, and then got up to manoeuvre around the free space in her room and make herself some kind of food - she could make rice and canned fish, and since her fridge had to stay off for the next day until some mysterious gasses had settled or something, that was going to have to do for this evening.

Grudgingly, she put some of both out for the cats, who stopped turning their noses up for long enough to inhale their dinner.

Sakura was just contemplating whether or not it was worth putting the kettle on - at this point in her life, putting the kettle on was just code for trouble, really - when a hissing, growling argument outside her door attracted her attention.

Anything that sounded like cats seemed bound to be Sakura's problem eventually.

She strode the three steps to her door and pulled it open.

The urge rose to slam it again immediately.

Cats. _Cats_. They'd multiplied again.

A strange, russet-furred cat, leggy and large-pawed like it hadn't quite finished all its growing, slunk inside without so much as a by-your-leave. And behind it...

...Ah.

That was where Itachi had gotten to.

And _that_ was where the hissing was coming from.

Somehow he'd dragged another cat up to the second floor of the ANBU barracks. When he released it on the doorstep, the cat shuddered all over, gave a low growling noise and launched itself at Itachi's head.

Sakura wasn't really surprised when Itachi ducked and twisted away, although she was a little concerned to see him still favouring his leg. Sure, she wanted to slam the door in Itachi's face and she'd given serious thought to poisoning him, but she'd put her effort and chakra into healing that leg. She wanted to make sure it was done properly. That was just about professional pride.

This newest cat, when she got a good look at it, was a cream point, a little underfed, with a long sinuous tail. He gave one last, very peeved, hiss at Itachi and turned his huge blue eyes on Sakura.

"Hi," she said, looking up and down the corridor. So far it was pretty quiet, but she _was_ technically surrounded by ANBU. For all she knew, the corridor could be full - if they were good enough at genjutsu, there could be a whole army out here.

Itachi came in without looking back at the other cat. Sakura could hear him take two soft steps and then leap up toward the window ledge, quiet but not quite silent.

The new cat eyed the room beyond the door, made a _rrrwwr_ noise of discontent, and then came in anyway.

About half a second before Sakura closed the door, Hidan came out of nowhere, landed on the new cat, and bounded inside to tackle Kakuzu for absolutely no reason Sakura could see.

There was a screech from deeper in the room, then a hiss, a scrambling of claws and a throaty growl. Something went _thud_. A third yowling voice entered the fray.

They were _so loud_. Sakura closed the door, cringing, and hoped her new neighbours weren't about to murder her in her sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If there was something you liked, let me know in a comment. :3

**Author's Note:**

> What is plot even.


End file.
